This recent piece in USNews describes the results of a poll about how young parents feel about their kids' use of smartphones and tablets. Let's use this story to practice what you are learning about surveys and polls. Here's one excerpt from the journalist's story. Surveying more than 2,300 parents of children up to age …
Category: Chapter 07; Sampling
Malnutrition statistics in North Korea
This Wall Street Journal article describes how a team of U.S. and European professors traveled to North Korea to teach students there about quantitative methods for studying their population. North Korea, the story says, has "some of the least reliable statistics in the world." Please take a look at the pop-out map of North Korea …
More than half of US teens text while driving…
This recent story from msnbc.com reports that "nearly 60 percent of teens text while driving." From the story: An anonymous national survey conducted last year found that 58 percent of high school seniors said they had texted or emailed while driving during the previous month. About 43 percent of high school juniors acknowledged they did …
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Report: Internet hyperconnectivity might change young adults
The Pew Research Center recently released a report on the internet's effect on millenials. The report notes that Teens and young adults brought up from childhood with a continuous connection to each other and to information will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in …
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Most Americans report 2 friends
A report suggests that among Americans, the average number of close friends people report having is just two. You can read an msnbc report of the study here. The study reports that the researchers ...surveyed more than 2,000 adults ages 18 and older from the nationally representative Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) program. …
Fewer babies on Halloween?
This story reports that pregnant women are less likely to go into spontaneous labor on a negatively toned holiday (Halloween). Similarly, they are more likely to do so on a positively toned holiday (Valentine's Day). Here's a quote from the New York Times story: In a study published this month, however, researchers at the Yale …
Tracking happiness on Twitter
A recent study used Twitter text to track people's moods throughout the day. Here's how the study was covered by wired.com. The journalist explained that: Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a text analysis program that quantifies the emotional content of statements, Golder and co-author Michael Macy analyzed a total of 509 million tweets generated …
Poll on the Tea Partiers: August 2011
Recently, two political scientists wrote an essay in the New York Times explaining some polling data they had collected on the Tea Party political group in the United States. Here's one of the claims in their article: "Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 …
How much time do caregivers spend?
The Gallup organization published the results of a recent poll on caregivers. The poll used a sample of people who are caring for another person in their family. It reported that most of them (7 out of 10) are taking care of a parent or another elderly person. The report indicated that caregivers spend on …
Online poll on disaster preparedness.
Soon after the great earthquake and tsunami in Northeast Japan, an article appeared on the CNN website about disaster preparedness in the United States: Is “duck and cover” still the best we can do? This article reports an online poll conducted by CNN on people’s confidence in U.S. disaster preparedness. It reports that 80% of …