February 20, 2014

Astronomy vs astrology: it’s complicated

As he comments this StatsChat post, Jim Lindgren did a similar test of the astrology/astronomy confusion hypothesis, with different results.

I replicated Landers study using the two NSF questions actually used, rather than questions that Landers made up. I then asked two followup questions designed to probe what the respondents meant by astrology.

If you ask the actual questions used in the NSF study and probe further than Landers did, you get completely different results from Landers’. In my sample, only 1 of 108 respondents seemed confused in the way that Landers hypothesized.

You can read about my replication in my blog post at the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/02/18/did-people-confuse-astronomy-with-astrology-in-the-nsf-study/

 

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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 »