March 5, 2012
Stat of the Week Competition: March 3-9 2012
Each week, we would like to invite readers of Stats Chat to submit nominations for our Stat of the Week competition and be in with the chance to win an iTunes voucher.
Here’s how it works:
- Anyone may add a comment on this post to nominate their Stat of the Week candidate before midday Friday March 9 2012.
- Statistics can be bad, exemplary or fascinating.
- The statistic must be in the NZ media during the period of March 3-9 2012 inclusive.
- Quote the statistic, when and where it was published and tell us why it should be our Stat of the Week.
Next Monday at midday we’ll announce the winner of this week’s Stat of the Week competition, and start a new one.
The fine print:
- Judging will be conducted by the blog moderator in liaison with staff at the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland.
- The judges’ decision will be final.
- The judges can decide not to award a prize if they do not believe a suitable statistic has been posted in the preceeding week.
- Only the first nomination of any individual example of a statistic used in the NZ media will qualify for the competition.
- Employees (other than student employees) of the Statistics department at the University of Auckland are not eligible to win.
- The person posting the winning entry will receive a $20 iTunes voucher.
- The blog moderator will contact the winner via their notified email address and advise the details of the $20 iTunes voucher to that same email address.
- The competition will commence Monday 8 August 2011 and continue until cancellation is notified on the blog.
Statistic: It ain’t over’, port union warns
Source: NZ herald
Date: 07/03/2012
The NZ herald poll was not designed well.
Apart from selection bias, readers do not have enough options to select.
Personally, i think the workers are in the worst position. But Aucklanders tend to blame workers rather than the union’s leaders…
so the options should be uinon or poa, then neither side or else
12 years ago
Statistic: Students flee NZ over job fears
Source: NZ Herald
Date: Feb 25, 2012
The results were obtained from an online survey, which would have led to self-selection bias, since anyone could take part in the survey. Students were not specifically chosen to be surveyed.
There could also have been selection bias, as students without an internet connection would not be able to answer the survey, thus leaving out a significant part of the population of interest.
To conclude, this is not a very well done poll and should not be claimed to represent the true feelings of students in New Zealand.
12 years ago
Statistic: ‘Women: good at budgets, bad savers’
Women are more likely than men to feel financially insecure, a survey by Westpac has found. An online survey of 400 women and 380 men found 44 % of women felt financially insecure compared to 35% of men…. 21% were worried about their financial future, compared with 14% of men.
27% women said putting money into savings and investments was a current focus vs 37% of men.
” The survey showed Kiwi women were running most of the household budgets, but were not looking after their own financial future.”
” Westpac NZ general manager retail bank Gai McGrath said women needed to get more savvy… ” A man is not a financial plan.”
Source: Nz Herald
Date: 08/03/2012
This is what I think of is a good example of anot so great stats being malaproppriated in a sociological/media context to say more than the figures CAN say.
In this case it makes my blood boil, because it goes from taking numbers which rely on self-reporting ( i.e. if I feel insecure does that mean I have an objective reason to feel insecure or do I simply worry a lot ?) to seemingly imply with the end quote that women are financially irresponsible and rely on men. The problems I see with this is…
1. It is known women get paid LESS than men for doing the same jobs. Yet there is not a hint of that possibly affecting the results in their reporting.
2.A woman is more likely than a man to be involved in unpaid labour -ie being a homemaker.
3. We don’t know if there was a criteria for the sample selection aside from it being most likely self-selected. What isn’t reported is if the survey included/or noted how many of the participants are in full time employment/ part-time employment/unemployed? How many are single parents? What is the objective salary of the respondents? ( i.e. ARE the women who responded to the survey actually paid less and does that correspond with them feeling more insecure?) Do they have a joint account/ their own personal account? Are they in a partnership/family vs being single? Are those factors affecting the results?
There are so many questions which the basic surface numbers of the percentages do not touch on. Yet these numbers are being used to imply by the general manager of a bank no less, that women are somehow more thoughtless with money and future planning and rely on men. As a female I find that insulting because just by looking at the stats that is a long bow to draw from a couple of self-reported, self-selected numbers without knowing more about other variables that might be affecting that result.
Furthermore I think the part about Kiwi women running most of the budgets is important. For one, are these Westpac Customers really representative of Kiwi women as the sample wasn’t random? Secondly, I do wonder why the actual figure was excluded from the article. To me if there was a statistically significant difference between men and women budgeting for households, then it would make sense to then ask if the ones dealing with planning and day to day expenses are more worried about the future? Is there perhaps a correlation between budgeting and worrying about the financial future?
To sum up what was surely a long rant, this is an example of very limited numbers/ statistics being used by the media to suggest something I find misogynistic. The actual survey and numbers are very shaky evidence to draw any conclusions, especially about Kiwi women. This stat is affected by selection bias, self-reporting bias and possibly even a social desirability bias element in that are men likely to admit to feeling insecure when not that long ago a man’s ‘role’ was thought to be to provide financial stability?)
I find this stat an example of irresponsible journalism to take what I would deem an unreliable and limited statistical result, rip it apart from any current sociological context, and pair it with a quote as if those numbers support that one person’s view when they don’t.
A badly designed survey is being published in a national newspaper pared with a quote perpetuating stereotypes and the sad thing is unless you have actually studied statistics, I think most people will simply take it at face value.
End rant.
P.S.
After re-reading the article I realized another important thing – NOWHERE in the piece does it say that 44% vs 35% is a statistically significant result! In plain English if I asked girls and boys if they liked pink and 7 girls said they liked pink vs 5 boys while one number is bigger than the other it does not mean that it is a statistically significant result. All stats to act as evidence to support something ( medicine, psychology, sociology, whatever) need to be statistically significant. Otherwise you’re just quoting numbers and implying a lot without actual evidence.
*Gets off soapbox*
12 years ago
Statistic: ‘In the study, pictures of 19 men from New Zealand and Samoa making normal, and angry faces with and without beards were shown to more than 200 women, who were asked to rate them for attractiveness.’
Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10790488
Date: 7:25 PM Wednesday Mar 7, 2012 Email
The claim is that “That’s the finding of a study, which showed women find clean-shaven men significantly more attractive than those sporting the more natural, hairier look.”
They use the term ‘woman’, but the article explains that ‘Researchers from New Zealand and Canada’.
They only used woman from New Zealand and Canada, but class the findings as ‘woman’ in general.
Furthermore, the article states ‘In the study, pictures of 19 men from New Zealand and Samoa making normal, and angry faces with and without beards were shown to more than 200 women, who were asked to rate them for attractiveness.’
“More than 200” is not a very accurate and precise sample size of a population. The article also assumes that these 200 women represent woman in general.
They also asked the females for their opinions only on males from New Zealand and Samoan decent. Their own preference in males may lead them to prefer a specific ethnicity, not the two included in the survey, which would result in the survey having biases.
12 years ago
Statistic: Call to ban garden and food waste from general rubbish bins.
Source: NZ Herald
Date: 5:30 AM Friday Mar 9, 2012
The statistics used in this article may have a significant impact in the way Aucklander’s dispose of their “Green Waste” and waste in general in the near future.
In addition the findings such as “Food waste made up 40 per cent of the rubbish collected from Auckland homes and needed a more extensive, costly and hygienic process to compost than that for garden cuttings and weeds” and “Members of the collective feared that a council-run green-waste collection would ruin their $9 million enterprise, which served 65,000 homes at no cost to ratepayers” as well as “They could instead help the council reduce recyclable green waste in the household rubbish from the present 10.4 per cent to 3 per cent” are an okay use of statistics in the media but may mislead and confuse NZ Herald readers, but overall the story is a positive use of statistics but there is no real reputable source for the statistics to back up their claims.
12 years ago
Statistic: “Wellingtonians were far less likely to be burgled than their Auckland counterparts, with 31 per cent of all burglaries taking place in the Auckland region, compared with just under 9 per cent in Wellington.”
Source: Dominion Post
Date: 8 March 2012
If this one wins, the prize should go to Bill Kaye-Blake, not me. He lays it all out here:
http://gropingtobethlehem.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/statistical-crimes/
The Dom here presents pure innumerate idiocy. Assessing appropriate punishment for the author is an exercise left to the reader. How many people live in Auckland compared to Wellington? Here’s Bill’s excellent critique:
“Let’s consider the probabilities. At the 2006 Census, Auckland had 1.3 million of the 4.0 New Zealanders, or 32.4 per cent of the population. Wellington had 0.45 million, or 11.1 per cent. That gives us 32.4:11.1 versus 31:9. Wellingtonians are a bit less likely to be burgled, but (a) it isn’t ‘far less likely’, and (b) there’s no basis for the assessment without the base population figures.”
He also tears up some nonsense on the effectiveness of house alarms in preventing burglaries on similar basis: no consideration of base rates.
Bill concludes:
“Base probabilities — they aren’t just a good idea, they’re Bayes’s law.”
12 years ago