Out of how many?
Stuff has a story under the headline ACC statistics show New Zealand’s riskiest industries. They don’t. They show the industries with the largest numbers of claims.
To see why that’s a problem, consider instead the number of claims by broad ethnicity grouping: 135000 for European, 23100 for Māori, 10800 for Pacific peoples(via StatsNZ). There’s no way that European ethnicity gives you a hugely greater risk of occupational injury than Māori or Pacific workers have. The difference between these groups is basically just population size. The true risks go in the opposite direction: 89 claims per 1000 full-time equivalent workers of European ethnicities, 97 for Māori, and 106 for Pacific.
With just the total claims we can’t tell whether working in supermarkets and grocery stores is really much more dangerous than logging, as the story suggests. I’m dubious, but.
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 »