Colorado State University — Pueblo; Fall 2014
Math 156: Introduction to Statistics
Information about Applied Statistical Exegeses

The goal of each of these exegeses is to take a statistical result you find in the press, in a textbook or article you are reading from another class, or even from a website you like, and to analyze that result in the terminology of this course.

Format

Source with reference:

Get your result to be analyzed from any source you like, although it would be better to choose one that has a chance of being well-designed and -presented. So: better The New York Times than The Onion or collegehumor.com. (Although The Onion might have a fun one, for one of your seven ASEs of the semester...)

You must submit a complete reference to your source. This need not be in any particular reference style (MLA or APS or whatever you like), but must be a reference that a reader could use to find that source. If your source is a website, give the precise and complete link.

Please also quote or include a photocopy (from a printed source) or printout (from a website) of the relevant part of your source. This will likely be a single sentence, paragraph, and/or graphic.

Explanation/Translation:

Go through the result you are analyzing and explain everything it presents when restated in the terminology of this class. In particular, you will have to identify things like

• the individuals under study (actual individuals, families, GM cars, etc.
• the random variables collected
• the sample size
• the sampling method
• statistical methods used (mean/median/quartile/percentile, bar graph/pie chart/histogram, regression line/percent change, "statistically significant"/"statistical hypothesis", etc., etc.)

See the examples, below.

Critique:

Finally, write a few sentences or paragraphs giving a critical look at your analyzed result. See if you can find problems with the authors' approach. Comment on whether those problems might be unavoidable or if you can suggest another approach which might have been used to get better (more reliable) results. Speculate on the whether the right choice was made in the choice of statistical tools:

• was a mean used when a median might have been better (because of outliers)?
• would a graph have been more informative if the axis went from 0 to 100%, rather than only 60-70%?
• was a mean reported without accompanying standard deviation?
• etc., etc.

Examples

1. Here's a simple example using just the most basic terminology from the first weeks of our course.
2. Here's another very basic example.
3. Here's an example which relates to linear regression.

Resources

• any material used in one of your other classes
• any online version of a newspaper, such as
  • The Pueblo Chieftain
  • The Denver Post
  • The New York Times
  • many, many others...
• a specifically data-driven organization, such as one of the following [descriptions below, when in quotation marks and italics are taken from the respective site's self-description]
  • FiveThirtyEight [FiveThirtyEight is an on-line journalism site which applies careful research and thoughtful statistical modeling to current stories in politics, economics, science, "life", and sports. It was founded by Nate Silver, who has done statistical analysis for sports betting and also predicted state-by-state the outcomes in the last several presidential elections with incredible accuracy.]
  • The Pew Research Center ["Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research does not take policy positions."]
  • The Gapminder Foundation ["Gapminder is a non-profit venture – a modern 'museum' on the Internet – promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals."]
  • the Gallup polling organization ["Gallup delivers forward-thinking research, analytics, and advice to help leaders solve their most pressing problems. Combining more than 75 years of experience with its global reach, Gallup knows more about the attitudes and behaviors of the world's constituents, employees, and customers than any other organization."]