{"id":72445,"date":"2018-06-26T11:49:03","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T16:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=72445"},"modified":"2018-06-26T11:49:03","modified_gmt":"2018-06-26T16:49:03","slug":"the-half-dozen-headline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2018\/06\/26\/the-half-dozen-headline\/","title":{"rendered":"The Half-Dozen Headline"},"content":{"rendered":"

Want to help fight fake news and manage political panics? We have to learn to talk about numbers.<\/p>\n

While teaching basic statistics to sociology undergraduates, one of the biggest trends I noticed was students who thought they hated math experiencing a brain shutdown when it was time to interpret their results.\u00a0I felt the same way when I started in this field, and so I am a big advocate for working hard to bridge the gap between numeracy and literacy.\u00a0You don’t have to be a statistical wizard to make your reporting clear to readers.<\/p>\n

Sociology is a great field to do this, because we are used to going out into the world and finding all kinds of cultural tropes (like\u00a0pointlessly gendered products!<\/a>). My new favorite trope is the Half-Dozen Headline. You can spot them in the wild, or through Google News with a search for “half dozen.” Every time I read one of these headlines, my brain echoes with “half of a dozen is six.”<\/p>\n

Sometimes, six is a lot:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sometimes, six is not:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(at least, not relative to past administrations<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Sometimes, well, we just don’t know:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Is this five deaths (nearly\u00a0<\/em>six)? Is a rate of about two deaths a year in a Walmart parking lot high? If people already struggle to interpret raw numbers, wrapping your findings in fuzzy language only makes the problem worse.<\/p>\n

Spotting Half-Dozen Headlines is a great introductory exercise for classes in social statistics, public policy, journalism, or other fields that use applied data analysis. If you find a favorite Half-Dozen Headline, be sure to send it our way!<\/p>\nEvan Stewart<\/a> is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website<\/a>, or on BlueSky<\/a>.<\/i> <\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Want to help fight fake news and manage political panics? We have to learn to talk about numbers. While teaching basic statistics to sociology undergraduates, one of the biggest trends I noticed was students who thought they hated math experiencing a brain shutdown when it was time to interpret their results.\u00a0I felt the same way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1893,"featured_media":72449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23624,274,85,108],"class_list":["post-72445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-media-newsopinion","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-politics","tag-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2018\/06\/Untitled-e1530031569873.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72445","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\/1893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72445"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72451,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72445\/revisions\/72451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}