Current nominations for Stat of the Week – add yours before midday

Thanks for all the nominations on our Stat of the Week competition, there’s still a couple of hours to add yours in before this week’s competition closes.

Nominations to date which qualify are:

Online NZ Herald poll: Port workers’ sacking – who do you support?

Sammy Jia points out that the options are only “The sacked workers” and “Ports of Auckland”. There is no option for saying “Neither side” or “Don’t know”.

Women: good at budgets, bad savers

Ksenia Kovaleva rants:

“This is an example of very limited numbers/ statistics being used by the media to suggest something I find misogynistic. The actual survey and numbers are very shaky evidence to draw any conclusions, especially about Kiwi women. This stat is affected by selection bias, self-reporting bias and possibly even a social desirability bias element in that are men likely to admit to feeling insecure when not that long ago a man’s ‘role’ was thought to be to provide financial stability?)

I find this stat an example of irresponsible journalism to take what I would deem an unreliable and limited statistical result, rip it apart from any current sociological context, and pair it with a quote as if those numbers support that one person’s view when they don’t.

A badly designed survey is being published in a national newspaper pared with a quote perpetuating stereotypes and the sad thing is unless you have actually studied statistics, I think most people will simply take it at face value.” Read the full nomination »

Attractiveness of beards

Jordan Yates critiques an article in the NZ Herald on the attractiveness of beards.

Rubbish statistics

Manakaetau ‘Otai says statistics in a NZ Herald article:

“may mislead and confuse NZ Herald readers, but overall the story is a positive use of statistics but there is no real reputable source for the statistics to back up their claims”

Let us know what you think of the nominations!