{"id":12468,"date":"2009-08-19T09:37:38","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T14:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=12468"},"modified":"2017-09-10T17:09:49","modified_gmt":"2017-09-10T22:09:49","slug":"meaningless-statistics-from-media-outlets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/08\/19\/meaningless-statistics-from-media-outlets\/","title":{"rendered":"Meaningless Statistics from Media Outlets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2009\/08\/Capture19.jpg\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-31009\" src=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2009\/08\/Capture19.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"362\" height=\"70\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cc.com\/video-clips\/xd8n18\/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-poll-bearers\">This clip<\/a> from The Daily Show nicely illustrates how ridiculous and utterly meaningless the statistics we encounter can be:<\/p>\n<div style=\"background-color:#000000;width:520px;\">\n<div style=\"padding:4px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/media.mtvnservices.com\/embed\/mgid:arc:video:comedycentral.com:1e8d2996-ed01-11e0-aca6-0026b9414f30\" width=\"512\" height=\"288\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>This probably goes without saying, but there are multiple problems here:<\/p>\n<p>1. Viewers of these shows are a self-selected group who are quite likely watching because they agree with the hosts to some degree, so it wouldn&#8217;t be surprising they&#8217;d agree with the hosts&#8217; views.<\/p>\n<p>2. Viewers who care enough to text are an even more unusual group, likely to be those who feel most passionately about an issue.<\/p>\n<p>3. Only those people watching the show and are able to text right then are able to vote.<\/p>\n<p>4. The wording of the questions is clearly intended to lead to a particular answer, using leading phrases like &#8220;are you outraged,&#8221; which responsible social scientists would never use&#8211;any question that uses something along the lines of &#8220;don&#8217;t you agree&#8221; or &#8220;wouldn&#8217;t you say that&#8221; makes it more likely the respondents will, indeed, agree with the point.<\/p>\n<p>5. The hosts actively cajole viewers to give a specific answer if they aren&#8217;t getting as many of that answer as they wanted.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the hosts aren&#8217;t trying to present factual, useful information and almost certainly know very well that they&#8217;re manipulating questions to get results that will appear to overwhelmingly support their position. But we&#8217;re inundated with &#8220;statistics&#8221; such as these every day that are completely meaningless, but many many people don&#8217;t know how to evaluate them. This little clip shows some of the things a person should look for as an indication that a number was created to support a particular viewpoint and should be viewed with extreme skepticism, if not dismissed altogether.<\/p>\n<span class=\"ft_signature\"><em>Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This clip from The Daily Show nicely illustrates how ridiculous and utterly meaningless the statistics we encounter can be: This probably goes without saying, but there are multiple problems here: 1. Viewers of these shows are a self-selected group who are quite likely watching because they agree with the hosts to some degree, so it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[129,343,274,85],"class_list":["post-12468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12468","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\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12468"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70555,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12468\/revisions\/70555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}