Takes two to tango
There’s a Stat-of-the-Week nomination for a Dominion Post article that I haven’t seen, because Stuff has had the good sense not to put it online. The press release is on Scoop, and from what our correspondent says, if you’ve read that, you’ve read the story. It’s about sex at the office, based on a ridiculously small sample selected from members of a dating website. Since the dating website in question makes a lot of how different its members are from typical people, representativeness is not likely. Also, their infographic disagrees with the text of the release in at least one place.
That’s all standard. What’s interesting is the comparison of proportion of men and women who have had sex in various situations. Now, for the heterosexual majority, we have a basic accounting constraint in play. The office-sex survey says 20% of men and 3% of women have got it on in a conference room and 15% of men and 2% of women have done so in a storage room. If these numbers were true there would be only three explanations: there are a lot more gay men around than other data suggest, and they really like the office; the few women who have sex at the office do so with many different men; or we have a Clintonesque definitional problem where the vast majority of the women involved don’t think what they did was sex. More likely, it’s just evidence that the numbers are meaningless.
We’ve seen this problem before, but at least this is one problem the Herald’s story about holiday romance based on an Expedia press release avoided.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »