Week 2 Paper Ashley Twyman Misunderstood, misused or incomplete statistics can lead to incorrect decisions. Read the following information about air bag performance and discuss how the statistics could be misused in this situation. What type of questions will you ask to ensure that the statistics you are being told won’t mislead you? In this situation, like many others, there are a variety of ways that the statistics could be misused. If the individuals collecting data only did so within one state of a few states in the US, it should be clearly stated what states they pulled information from. Are these statistics for every auto maker in the world or just certain countries? If the data was pulled from a collection of every state in the US, we should think about how many accident reports were pulled from each state. Is it possible to pull every accident report from every state in order to asses the air bag situations within all those accidents? Of course that would be too much information to compile and graph statistically! There could actually be many more accidents involving children. There could be more information about which accidents involved restrained vs. unrestrained children. There ideally could be many more deaths from accidents involving air bags which were not pulled for information. We have to remember that a broad selection was taken for the statistics provided. Therefore, to fully understand the statistics in this case, we must probe deeper before we can accept them by asking questions. Questions that can be asked in order to ensure that the presented statistics aren’t going to be misleading may consist of: 1.) How was the situation defined? 2.) Who was surveyed? 3.) How many people were contacted? 4.) How was the sample taken? 5.) How were the questions worded? 6.) Is there any ambiguity? For this particular situation, questions which could be asked may be: 1.) How was the information regarding the airbag statistics obtained? 2.) Where was the area of concentration for the field of study? 3.) Which car companies were contacted about their vehicle air bags? 4.) Did those companies give statistics? 5.) Where did their statistics come from? 6.) Is there any ambiguity? 7.) What areas of the world and which automotive manufacturers were polled? 8.) What questions were they asked? 9.) Where did the accident reports come from? 10.)Were all accident reports taking into account or a random selection? 11.)What was this selection based off of or was it a random sample?
Once these questions can be identified and answered, we may be able to accept the statistics in this situation.