Statistics: Useful or Useless

Statistics: Useful or Useless

9/2/2009

In today's society, there is some kind of number or statistic that is used to validate some fact. Open a newspaper or a magazine and statistics are used to tell us the results of studies, announcements of breakthroughs, statistical reports, forecasts, projections, charts, graphs, and summaries (Rumsey, 2003). Statistics tell us the president's approval rating and whether it's rising or falling. Numbers are used to tell us whether one should feel good about the economy or down in the dumps. Statistics are used to measure our confidence as consumers, the output of factories and even measure the nation's debt. Therefore, the fact that our society relies so much on numbers these days, a basic knowledge and understanding of statistics is useful.

The basic definition of statistics is a branch of mathematics that deals with collecting, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting data in order to make decisions (Larson & Farber, 2009). In other words, statistics takes a bunch of raw data and attempts to make sense of them by putting them into groups and then interpreting the numbers' impact of those groups. Such data is useful to add credence to a particular topic of the day. Statistics are also helpful when it comes to determining usage patterns and tracking trends and changes as well as performance of services (Reasons for Using Statistics, 2009).

When it comes to the president's approval rating, surveys are taken from a sample of people across the nation, with results coming from their response to various questions. The numerical results are then calculated and converted into percentages. When the media reports that the president has a 42% approval rating, this means that 42% of those people surveyed in that sample liked the job the president was doing. What those statistics do not say, however, were the questions asked to the sample, or political leanings of that sample.

Nonetheless, the president's approval rating relies on what is known as inferential statistics, or statistics that involves using a sample to draw conclusions (Larson & Farber, 2009). When it comes to the president's approval ratings, no one has time to poll the millions of people living in the United States. So surveyors take a sample of people and then extrapolate the results to the rest of the nation. The problem with something like this, however, is that a 42% approval rating is typically a political thing. The people on one side can claim that it's not as low as some presidents experienced, while people on the other side claim that an approval rating of less than 50% means a president does not have most of the country behind him. Understanding how the data is collected and