Every year, at the first faculty meeting, representatives of the registrar tell us what percentage of the incoming class is [insert variable in which we are interested, such as American Indian, working class, international, etc].\u00a0 They compare it to last year’s percentage.\u00a0 This drives me crazy because they do so as if comparing the last two data points in a sequence is indicative of a trend. But to determine whether or not there is a trend, and therefore whether the increase or decrease in the percentage of [insert variable in which we are interested] significant relative to last year, depends on more than two data points!<\/p>\n
xkcd does an excellent job<\/a> of illustrating just how two data points can be utterly meaningless, even wildly fallacious.<\/p>\n Other great xkcd cartoons: attribution and the in group<\/a>, on statistical significance<\/a>, correlation or causation<\/a>, and the minimal group paradigm<\/a>.<\/p>\n Originally posted in 2009.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every year, at the first faculty meeting, representatives of the registrar tell us what percentage of the incoming class is [insert variable in which we are interested, such as American Indian, working class, international, etc].\u00a0 They compare it to last year’s percentage.\u00a0 This drives me crazy because they do so as if comparing the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[274],"class_list":["post-10549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-methodsuse-of-data"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2009\/07\/31.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10549"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71688,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10549\/revisions\/71688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}