Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

[lollardfish]

The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong.

From the NYT.

Interesting piece.

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i am not a statistics geek, just related to one. however, a few percent is a huge deal, statistically speaking. that's enough of a difference (at this size of study) so that it is a significant difference, and not attributable to margin of error. if it were a hundred people, changing from "slightly less than half" to 53 percent would be attributable to somebody writing something down wrong. but since it's millions of people being studied, slightly less than half to 53 percent is a change of tens of thousands of people, if not more.

[jadiana.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get that. :)


But my point was rather, that the article is saying that it's not as bad as all that, when really, it boils down to numbers that if you were to generalize, would still be called "about half".

The emphasis of the article implies a difference, that, frankly, isn't represented by a few percent.