Not the most literate?
The Herald (and/or the Otago Daily Times) say
New Zealand is the fifth most literate country in the world.
and
New Zealand ranked higher than Germany (9), Canada (10), the US (11), UK (14) and Australia (15).
Newshub had a similar story and the NZEI welcomed the finding. One of the nice things about the Herald story is it provides a link. If you follow that link, the ratings look a bit different.
There are five other rankings in addition to the “Final Rank”, but none of them has NZ at number five.
So, where did the numbers come from? It can’t be a mistake at the Herald, because Newshub had the same numbers (as did Finland Today, and basically everyone except the Washington Post)
Although nobody links, I did track down the press release. It has the ranks given by the Herald, and it has the quotes they used from the creator of the ranking. The stories would have been written before the site went live, so the reporters wouldn’t have been able to check the site even if it had occurred to them to do so. I have no idea how the press release managed to disagree with the site itself, and while it would be nice to see corrections published, I won’t hold my breath.
Underlying this relatively minor example is a problem with the intersection of ‘instant news’ and science that I’ve mentioned before. Science stories are often written before the research is published, and often released before it is published. This is unnecessary except for the biggest events: the science would be just as true (or not) and just as interesting (or not) a day later.
At least the final rank still shows NZ beating Australia.
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 »
It also shows a problem with quality control with the source organisation. Good practice is for the final approver to approve all of the media release, final web products, and anything else at the same time, precisely to avoid this common version control problem as numbers get revised in the lead up to a release. Of course, not always possible and no-one is perfect, but any time circumstances lead to staggered approval processes it should be a big danger sign.
9 years ago
This study also appears to have a rather narrow and old-fashioned notion of ‘literacy’ (libraries and newspapers), with no acknowledgement of media literacy nor digital competence.
9 years ago