Crunching the numbers to eliminate bias

With files from Patrick Persaud

Rania Tfaily is stripping away the romantic notions through which Western cultures interpret Eastern societal and cultural practices. The demographer is crunching numbers to reduce Western influenced bias in research.

Tfaily, a researcher in the department of sociology and anthropology is taking a new look at several research questions about the Middle East.

By studying demographic topics such as differentials in fertility rates, changes in the practice of cousin marriages, effects of family size and composition on the gender gap in education in the Middle East, Tfaily moves beyond inherent systemic biases by looking at concrete numbers to make her observations. To ensure accuracy, her data sets often exceed fifteen thousand people.

Tfaily is also interested in health and aging in North America and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Working with colleague Georges Reniers, she is examining the relationship between polygyny and HIV. The study looks at differences in the occurrence of HIV in monogamous and polygamous relationships and tests several hypotheses that could account for these. Another of Tfaily’s areas of research is the impact of family and individual characteristics on health, living arrangements and economic support in old age in Mexico and the U.S, which she hopes to expand into Canada.

“One of my future big goals is to do a comparative study of differentials in social mobility among Arabs/ Muslims in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the Middle East to see to what extent the political and macro-level social and economic conditions affect the relationship between one’s parents’ socioeconomic status and his/her standing in society.”