Orphanage Alums Appear To Do Well

Maybe all Americans should be raised in orphanages. An ongoing study of children raised in orphanages suggests that they may do better in life than other Americans.

Richard McKenzie is a professor at the School of Management at the University of California at Irvine and an alumnus of the Barium Springs Home for Children in North Carolina. He’s also the author of a new book, “The Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage.”

McKenzie has surveyed more than 300 orphans from his former orphanage who are now middle-aged or older. He also collected data from hundreds of adult former residents of eight other orphanages.

His research disclosed that these orphanage kids grew up to do better socially and professionally as a group than Americans of the same age and race.

Specifically, they were:

Less likely to divorce. About 20 percent of these orphans were divorced, compared to 29 percent of their contemporaries.

Earning more. Orphans earned on average $51,000 a year, compared to $42,000 for all middle-aged Americans.

More likely to be working. Fewer than 1 percent of the orphans in his study were unemployed, compared to about 6 percent of the population in the study year.

More likely to vote. Nearly 90 percent of orphans voted in the ‘92 presidential election, vs. 75 percent of middle-aged Americans.

Happier about their lives. Fifty-eight percent of the orphans he studied said they were “very happy” with the way their lives were going, compared to 29 percent of adults in a national survey that year.

These grown-up orphans also were better educated than comparably aged Americans and less likely to have ever collected welfare, said McKenzie, who’s trying to mount a national survey to confirm the results he’s consistently obtained studying individual orphanages.

He doesn’t claim an orphanage is kid heaven. “There were bad orphanages. All homes are imperfect in some way, and some orphans have suffered mistreatment,” he said. “But people have got to understand: Most orphans consider themselves advantaged by the experience. The overwhelming majority of those I studied looked back fondly.”

Stupid stats: the British experience

The numbers-challenged among us should take heart: Even the experts get it wrong - and more than just occasionally.

A newly published analysis found four in 10 numbers-based research papers published in a prestigious British psychiatric journal contained some kind of statistical error. “Judging by some of the elementary errors that have found their way into print, it seems that few papers are reviewed by statisticians,” concluded biostatistician Sean McGuigan in the latest issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

McGuigan reviewed all 248 research papers published during 1993 in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Two out of three published articles presented numerical results and 40 percent of those studies contained “at least one error in (research) design, statistical analysis and/or presentation of numerical results,” he found.

Some goofs were minor. In one paper, the greater than symbol was consistently used to represent less than symbol. But other mistakes were serious enough to cast doubt on conclusions. In one paper, computation of a critical statistic (the Chi Square statistic), was “found to be wrong, reversing the main conclusion of the researcher.”