When our oldest son was about 9 years old he had to do a project for school on a Russian Composer. He choose to write about Aram Khachaturian. He produced a project to be proud of with interesting stores and statistics. When his mother asked him where he got the information he said that he had made it all up. Edmond Morris wrote the biography of Ronald Reagan and much of the material he had in his book was fiction rather than fact because he thought it would make more interesting reading.
I taught High School and College Mathematics and one of the courses I taught was Statistics. Statistics can help us in understanding data but it can also mislead us. For example, someone did a study and found that the more churches there are in a community the more bars there are. His conclusion was that either people who drank felt guilty and needed to go to church or people who endured boring sermons needed a drink to refresh themselves. Of course both of those conclusions are incorrect as there is a third factor that needed to be included and that was the size of the town.
Should we believe statistics or are they lies told in a scientific form? Someone once said that 93.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot. When doing a survey questions asked one way can lead to an entirely different conclusion than if the questions were asked differently.
2 comments:
As far as surveying goes we found this to be especially true while we were doing language research in Nepal. If we asked yes/no questions we would get a much different response then if we asked open questions. It seemed like most people would answer yes even if it wasn't true. And with open questions, they would say yes to certain questions if we suggested answers... sometimes even multiple answers that were conflicting.
I'd like to hear what Andrew has to say about his research on Aram Khachaturian.
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