Like cooking a turkey, statistical analysis is a messy process requiring a thermometer and some stabs in the dark. However, taking the temperature of a community requires more complicated data monitoring than a turkey.
In Powell River Community Foundation’s recently released Vital Signs report statistics are indicators of community health, meant to start conversations, spark debates and provide fodder for grant applications.
Vital Signs reports assess aspects of a community’s overall health by examining indicators such as education, housing, economy, safety and arts and culture.
Much like a meat thermometer, Vital Signs reports are simply blunt indicators. Rather than providing information on their own, they simply support more in-depth inquiry. After all, just because a turkey is hot it doesn’t mean it is done.
Take Powell River’s graduation record, for example. While these numbers are precise, they do not present a complete picture. Alone, the fact that only 53 per cent of grade 12 students in Powell River graduate the first time around isn’t a true indicator of our education system.
Nevertheless, when seen in combination with the strong second-time round graduation rate of 93 per cent (which is actually above the provincial average of 84.2 per cent), this number indicates that students in Powell River are merely making different choices with regards to their education than elsewhere in the province.
Statistical analysis is fraught with problems. As a science, statistics involves the collection and analysis of large quantities of numerical data for the purpose of inferring if proportions in those things counted represent what is found in the whole.
Statistics are a means to an end and not the end itself. No statistic is ever presented alone or should it be taken out of context.
Statistics are gathered through processes often mean, median and mystical. Numbers can be precise or they can be accurate, but they can seldom be both without a human there to interpret them.
As late Scottish poet and novelist Andrew Lang once said, statistics should be used “as a drunken man uses lampposts, for support rather than for illumination.”
