Or more like how statistics mean nothing.
See the news story here, and the full report here. So the report is based on many things but the headline grabbing part is based on statistics from Norway and Denmark. Interesting statistics indeed... however let's say a few things about them.
1) We don't get given a breakdown of causes of death... for all we know being gay just makes you more likely to be beaten to death than married people. I'm not suggesting that's the case but how can we judge what the statistics mean if we don't have that info. For all we know all the gays were smokers!!
2) OK, I feel that the studies not properly weighted. There were 333, 336 hetero men + 353,483 hetero women (Denmark) against 561 gay men + 91 gay women. Then there were 110, 031 hetero men + 117, 833 hetero women (Norway) against 31 gay men + 6 gay women. Even going by the 1 percent of the population figure bandied about in this report the representation of homosexuals was well below their actual presence in the population versus heterosexuals used. So I don't trust these figures one bit. Why not actually do a survey of gay men against heterosexual men rather than married men versus partnered ones. What length of time were these partnerships versus the marriages? Marriages are known to have health benefits but I suspect you need to be in one for quite a while for these benefits to take affect... Denmark didn't legalise registered partnerships until recently... etc etc...
3) Using Washington Post and Washington Blade Obituaries to assess the general population is a bit like using the Who's Who guide to formulate general economic policy for the whole population.
I'm not even a mathematician and these are the problems I've spotted after one reading of just this part of the report (I read the rest but didn't pay much attention).
Christians... get some science!
Or more: How To Lie With Statistics - The Religious Way
ReplyDelete(...but isn't that the best way to lie most of the times?...)