But how big will the next burrito bowl be? Generic burrito bowl photo: B Young/Shutterstock An important concept in both statistics and methods is variability. And this analysis conducted by Wells Fargo consultants does a nice job illustrating the concept of variability. They'd been seeing social media complaints about a popular restaurant chain wasn't always …
Category: Chapter 07; Sampling
When questionable survey methods reach the Supreme Court
According to the report, the Court may have been misled by the quality and true findings of survey on the habits of gun owners. Photo: B Christopher/Alamy Stock Photo Polling research can play a critical role in shaping public opinion and public policy, so it's crucial that it be conducted well. Polling (survey) research is …
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Most American adults feel awkward
The journalist's uncritical acceptance of this frequency claim's data is also awkward. Photo credit:JRP Studio/Shutterstock Here's an interesting set of frequency claims about what percentage of U.S. adults feel awkward. The data were presented at the content farm StudyFinds, under the headline, "That's awkward! 68% still often feel as insecure as they did as teens" …
Latinos’ experiences with the Spanish language
Does the methodology of this survey allow us to generalize the result to all U.S. Latino adults? Photo credit: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock It's been awhile since we've interrogated a frequency claim. Pew Research has some new data about U.S. Latinos' experience with speaking Spanish. Pew's synopsis is here. There's a lot of fascinating content and …
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Producer focus: Estimating how long your survey will take
How long will your survey take? Photo: MarutStudio/Shutterstock Here's a post for producers of research (especially students who are designing their own surveys). I'm a fan of the Pew Research Center's polling website, in part because they are transparent about their methods, and in part because they share educational content about how to do good …
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Personality correlates of liking spicy foods
Photo credit: marcoscastillo/Deposit photos Here's another article from the content farm website, StudyFinds. This one's on the personality correlates of liking spicy foods, and it includes a combination of frequency and association claims. The same poll was also covered by the NYPost and by Yahoo! News (with a video) Below I will post a series of …
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Racial disparities in media coverage
The study evaluated both victims and defendants in criminal cases. Compared to white victims, the media were much less likely to depict photos of Black victims of crime with family or friends. How might this choice impact people's empathy for Black pain and suffering? Credit: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a human-rights organization …
Estimating how many U.S. adults identify as nonbinary
Photo credit: nito103/Deposit Photos Press outlets have been covering a report by the Williams Institute (based at UCLA), a research organization collecting data on demographic information on sexual orientation and gender identity. The quotes in this post come from this summary from PBS. The new study has estimated the number of LGBTQ adults in …
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Frequency claims: Fitter and better rested during lockdown
One of the positive changes people reported was being able to spend more time with family. Photo: Steve Skjold / Alamy Stock Photo The first peer-reviewed studies about the COVID-19 pandemic are starting to appear in journals, and journalists are starting to summarize them in the popular press. Let's explore this summary of a survey …
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Teaching with 100 Humans
In 2020, Netflix released an 8-episode series called "100 Humans" in which 100 (American) humans from a variety of ages and social groups participate in a series of studies. It's a gold mine of examples for critical thinking in research methods. You'll find examples of posttest-only, pretest-posttest designs, HARKing, ethics, and more. Most of the …