singemonkey wrote
The paper has not been published yet. She is talking about her work in progress.
Sample size is irrelevant for qualitative work (in-depth interviews, focus groups, etc.). You are not trying to generalise with qualitative work, but to form hypotheses by getting free input from people chosen for their knowledge of the study topic which you may later test quantitatively - or to interpret the context of quantitative findings. You ask as many people as you need to until it starts to become clear that you are getting redundant info consistently.
The quantitative work (the survey) has a sample size of 1000.
While there are always context differences, many of us have experienced that white, urban, middle-class teens - especially in English speaking "former colonies" have a very similar, globalised culture of music and teen culture in general - and I would expect Australian results to very loosely be representative of white, middle-class teens in SA (the main market for metal in SA).
In terms of biases and constraints, that'll have to wait for the paper.
I think she's drawing a distinction between long term social isolation and simply isolating yourself from crowds on a train. In other words, sitting in your room all afternoon listening to Megadeth instead of hanging out with friends.
So yes, while the conclusions could be misleading or misjudged, they seem broadly consistent with my experience, at least, of troubled friends who listened to a lot of metal - which was a source of comfort, but yet further alienated them from the mainstream at the same time. Saying that's bad assumes that without metal, these kids would be happy and sociable. I don't think that's very likely.
Again, the key to her speculations (at this point) is that this behaviour may be an indicator that a kid is having a hard time and may benefit from help.
(help is very seldom defined by professionals as being told to "buck up," and "stop listening to devil music.")
So basically its a case of irresponsable journalism, drawing a biased conclusion from a unfinished, unpublished study.
