- Mar 11, 2015
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So many times discussions here bought up by blacks are purposefully derailed by people here whose agendas must be questioned. In so many cases they try citing statistics they find to support whatever it is they claim. Most of the time what they used is distorted. What you are about to read is an article written in June that is fact checking a claim of black and white murder rates.
Fact check: Misleading bar graph presents distorted interpretation of black and white murder rates
Shared on Facebook and Instagram, posts include a bar graph showing “murder of blacks and whites in the US, 2013” broken down by the races of the perpetrators. While the graph itself is accurate, the way it is presented is misleading.
Examples of such posts can be found here , here
Reuters contacted two statisticians, Regina L. Nuzzo, Ph.D., and Lucas Mentch, Ph.D., from the American Statistical Association ( www.amstat.org/ ) to ask whether this bar graph accurately represents the FBI data from which it originated.
“The thing first and foremost that jumps out is that the different columns are being standardized in different ways on the same chart,” said Mentch, also an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Pittsburgh. He explained that the “per 1,000,000 members of the murderer’s race” label at the top of the chart means that “you’re changing what you’re standardizing by in each of those bar charts,” which “doesn’t seem appropriate in this circumstance.” In other words, the numbers are presented side by side as if directly comparable, but are based on different benchmarks (per million black people or per million white people).
Because the graph labels “whites killed by blacks” as 9.83 per million black Americans and “whites killed by whites” as 10.22 per million white Americans, it gives the impression that “white people are killed by white and black people at about the same rate, which is definitely not the case when you standardize per capita,” Mentch said.
www.reuters.com
Fact check: Misleading bar graph presents distorted interpretation of black and white murder rates
Shared on Facebook and Instagram, posts include a bar graph showing “murder of blacks and whites in the US, 2013” broken down by the races of the perpetrators. While the graph itself is accurate, the way it is presented is misleading.
Examples of such posts can be found here , here
Reuters contacted two statisticians, Regina L. Nuzzo, Ph.D., and Lucas Mentch, Ph.D., from the American Statistical Association ( www.amstat.org/ ) to ask whether this bar graph accurately represents the FBI data from which it originated.
“The thing first and foremost that jumps out is that the different columns are being standardized in different ways on the same chart,” said Mentch, also an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Pittsburgh. He explained that the “per 1,000,000 members of the murderer’s race” label at the top of the chart means that “you’re changing what you’re standardizing by in each of those bar charts,” which “doesn’t seem appropriate in this circumstance.” In other words, the numbers are presented side by side as if directly comparable, but are based on different benchmarks (per million black people or per million white people).
Because the graph labels “whites killed by blacks” as 9.83 per million black Americans and “whites killed by whites” as 10.22 per million white Americans, it gives the impression that “white people are killed by white and black people at about the same rate, which is definitely not the case when you standardize per capita,” Mentch said.
Fact check: Misleading bar graph presents distorted interpretation of black and white murder rates
Shared on Facebook and Instagram, posts include a bar graph showing “murder of blacks and whites in the US, 2013” broken down by the races of the perpetrators. While the graph itself is accurate, the way it is presented is misleading.
www.reuters.com
