statistics

Flawed Data, Questionable Results: International Monetary Fund Research Gets Criticized

Research methodology scares a lot of people. There’s this idea that you need an advanced degree and very specialized education to design and conduct a research study. That isn’t always true – a lot of times, it’s just a matter of thinking logically about how to get and use meaningful data to help you understand a situation.

But researchers with advanced degrees and very specialized education, and working for hugely influential international policy-making and governance organizations – they know how to collect accurate data and analyze it appropriately. Right? Right??

Ummm….maybe not.

In March of this year, (more…)

Spurious Correlations, or, Why Nicolas Cage Must Be Stopped

There is a misguided assumption in a lot of media reporting on research that correlation equals causation. Correlation is a statistical relationship between two variables – for example, amounts of social service funding and crime rates – that assumes that one variable has some degree of dependence on the other.  In other words, if one variable changes, there should be a change in the other variable if the two are correlated.

There is a problem with this assumption, however – (more…)

Statistics and University “Rape Culture”

In the last few weeks, as a result of incidents such as a sexual assault investigation leading to the suspension of the University of Ottawa men’s hockey team and its coaches  and a University of Ottawa student politician alleging online sexual harassment, there has been a great deal of heated discussion about whether a “rape culture” exists on Canadian university campuses.

Columnist Barbara Kay at the National Post newspaper waded into the fray with this column, in which she states “[rape culture] does not exist” and presents statistics which she claims prove that statement. She also asserts that “[i]f these statistics do not convince you, then I suggest you are in the grip of a serious ideological virus. There is a remedy for it, called critical thinking.”

Okay, then. Let’s look critically at the statistics in Kay’s column. (more…)