Misuse of Statistics in Media - Political Motivation
By: Armen Hareyan
The preparation for this short Project revealed the growing concern on how a statistical survey may be or is being misused to support the vested interest of the funding agencies.
To find a political article a search was conducted online and the choice was made to select the article Poll suggest Saskatchewan NDP continues to lead that was published in the Canadian Internet Network on Monday, September 06, 1999. This is a pre-election article that discusses the leading position of the NDP party of the other parties sitting the support of the statistical survey.
Abuses of statistics can be done in many ways. It can be a bad sample, a small sample or the way the pictographs are drawn. It also can have misleading graphs or loaded questions that are worded in a way to elicit a desired response. There is an old saying that if you do not get a positive answer to your question, change the way you pose the question… Statistics can also be misused by the inclusion in a statement of a precise number. Indeed, our truth is composed of our understanding, but we must see events in their relationships. Yet there exist more ways of abusing the science of Statistics by deliberately distorting the results and by providing the partial picture not presenting the complete story.
The case in our chosen article is very similar to the last way of misuse of Statistics. Namely the article does not reveal any meaningful insights and the fact is that later the commending lead of the NDP party did not materialize at all at the election time. The article suggests that the survey is one-sided and therefore cannot reveal the truth of the reality. No matter the NDP later did not win the elections.
The conclusion is that the search for the truth, as stated in eMaxHealth.com is not a number or a fixed reality. People think that the statistical studies are a search to find the truth. The reality is that the agencies that fund these studies participate in manipulating the supposed resulting truth. What can be done to fix this? Perhaps the society has to reset its understanding of what the truth may be, or more specifically maybe there must be an independent verifying agency that would confirm the validity of the statistical findings…
Armen Hareyan is the Publisher of http://www.eMaxHealth.com providing daily news on topics of personal health, finance and health insurance.