The data speak for themselves?
This graph was on Twitter this morning. There’s nothing wrong with the graph: good data, clear presentation, but it does provide a nice illustration of the difficulties in official statistics — you have to decide what categories to use, and it makes a difference.
The second leading cause, motor vehicles, is straightforward enough. The first, firearms, is more complicated. A majority of the firearm deaths are suicides, and it’s controversial whether firearm access increases the suicide rate or just affects the method. Poisoning is also complicated: you might well want to treat both suicide and accidental recreational-drug overdose separately. And so on.
Sometimes you want to break down the data by intent, sometimes by physical cause, sometimes by medical type of injury or damage. You can’t define the ‘correct’ answer in the absence of a question.
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 »
Being the US, they ‘have codes for that’ , to breakdown the deaths by firearm
eg, *U01.4, Terrorism involving firearms (homicide);
W32–W34, Accidental discharge of firearms;
X72–X74, Intentional
self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms;
X93–X95, Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms;
Y22–Y24,Discharge of firearms, undetermined intent;
and Y35.0, Legal intervention
involving firearm discharge.
The last one of course is shot by police.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_06.pdf
6 years ago
Then there is the common claim that the most common cause of death/disability among women aged 15-49 is domestic violence. Clearly, it is not the proximate cause but it could be the original cause of things like suicide and death by drug abuse. These statistics are very hard to average people with limited time to understand. It actually turns out that the domestic violence claim is just false. (BBC Accidental economist).
6 years ago