Statistics in the Media

Posted: August 26th, 2021

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Statistics in the Media

The researched article is about the general healthy living among the Australians. The news article, dated November 2, 2017, discusses the health consciousness of the Aussies over time. The article employs the use of statistics to provide an overview of the information. There are two sets of statistics in this context, namely, percentages and typical cause relationship, as illustrated in the article, New Data Reveals Our Healthy and Not-So Healthy Habits. I consider the choices of these statistics as either used or misused by the media to advance different viewpoints among the Aussies and the whole world in large. Notably, the statistic is about healthy and not-so-healthy habits among the Aussies. Therefore, the news article employs either the right or wrong use of the statistics for influencing perceptions of the readers.

Description of the Employed Statistics

The news article provides an overview of how the Australians aspire to live and eat healthily. It entails the habits that they have recently undertaken in a bit to stop unhealthy practices. As much as the Aussies long for fitness, they face different challenges throughout the change of their lifestyles. The research consists of a conducted survey on Australian adults by LiveLighter, a company that does studies. From the collected information, it is clear that most Aussies think that they are more substantial, too busy to cook, and most of them do not work out. Most importantly, the article focuses on the fact that the Aussies do not eat enough of the vegetables. LiveLighter’s annual Shape of Australia survey investigated the health, nutrition, physical activity as well as behaviors of more than 2,000 Aussies who were aged between 25 and 49.To make the information statistically valid, the writer of the article featured inpercentages and the typical cause relationship statistical approaches,as in figure 1.

Figure 1. The findings of the LiveLighter’s 2017 annual Shape of Australia survey

How the Media Uses or Misuses Statistics to Promote Different Points of View

Statistical Percentages

The study analysis reveals that the utilization of percentages as an analytical technique is helpful in the media. It makes it easy to interpret and understand the data, thus get the logic of the information. The reason is that the percentages aid in summarizing the data by giving just an overview of the entire report. For example, 43% of Australians, which is assumed as almost half the total population, aspire to lose weight. The percentage of the total population consists of those individuals (35%) who are averagely standard weights but need to work out. Likewise, almost 2 out of 3 of the obese population try to undergo physical exercising activities.

Moreover, the media uses statistical percentages as a better tool forcomparing non-similar kinds of data. For example, the articles examine the idea of cooking and eating fruits to the numbers of the average weight and obese individuals about the time one has to undertake all these activities of healthy living. Indeed, this media article seeks to advance the view that a large percentage of the Aussies would love to eat healthily and exercise, but they have limited time. Consequently, the media conspicuously exhibit the significant willingness of the Aussies obese and averagely weighing persons in respect to health consciousness.

On the contrary, the misuse of statistical percentage by the media is regarded as a lousy tool since it promotes a misleading concept in the context of the Australian population. For instance, 1 out of 7 persons in totality does not work out, simply because they do not have time. With 42% of the people being affected over time, the media brings misconception that almost half of the Aussies lack time to cook and exercise. However, it simultaneously implies these people have time to do other essential activities in life, except cooking and exercising.

Statistical Common Cause Relationship

Through the research survey, the media brings about a typical cause relationship between the adding of weight among the Aussies and the need to undergo constant physical exercise activities. As much as there exists an indirect causal relationship between these two variables, time is the underlying factor that influences the dependence of these variables. As an example, 35% of averagely weighing persons and 43% of the obese aspire to work out physically. The percentage is significant for overweight people since they consider themselves unhealthy, and therefore they intend to start cooking and eating healthy coupled with physical exercises. Indeed, the media uses this kind of statistics to promote a reasonable perception that obesity comes to a result of not cooking and eating healthy, and of course, not exercising daily.

            Furthermore, with the use of this statistical technique, the media helps promote the public awareness that the Aussies would live a healthy life if they practice to cook and eat healthy food products such as vegetables and fruits. More so, they would achieve better if they equally practiced work out activities 3 days a week. On the contrary, the use of typical cause relationship has been misused to bring forth a misconception among the readers. Precisely, the news media has mostly signified that time affects the propensity of Australians to eat and live healthily. The sense that 42% of the entire population, who initially intended to practice healthy habits, cannot eat and live healthy due to limited time factor is a misleading concept among the public. Realistically, therefore, it is logical that one having time to participate in many other life activities will equally have time to involve in activities such as cooking, eating healthy, and exercising.

Assessing the Validity of Conclusions in the Media

Analyzing the validity of the concept that the media intends to publish, I do not understand the logic of using the statistical percentages together with thetypical cause relationship between increasing weight and the willingness to practice healthy habits. Thus, a statistical gap or errorexists, which brings about a negative correlation. For example, it is not possible to find out the exact percentage of the entire population who would not practice healthy habits because of time. It thus implies that there are other factorsin addition totime that could influence the number of people that would want a healthy life.

Ways of Making Statistics Better

The media would have impacted the statistics in a better way if it used distributive practice rather than mass sampling. The use of distributive practice techniques, such asregular distribution tables and percentiles, help spread data over a large scale, thus studying its distribution, correlation, and regression analysis more broadly, without missing out on crucialand essentialvariables.

Work Cited

“New Data Reveals Our Healthy and Not-So Healthy Habits.” Heart Foundation, November 2, 2017, www.heartfoundation.org.au/news/aussies-inspired-to-get-healthy-but-life-getting-in-the-way