An interesting statistic I heard the other day: 90% of crimes occur on rental property. The source was credible, but what his foundation for the statistic may have been, I couldn’t say.
Masson's Blog
An interesting statistic I heard the other day: 90% of crimes occur on rental property. The source was credible, but what his foundation for the statistic may have been, I couldn’t say.
And what percentage of crimes occur in specific (high crime) areas? And what percentage of properties in those areas are rentals? And…
Kind of like saying 95% of school bus accidents involve yellow buses.
It’s probably no more complicated than pointing out that poor people are the most common perpetrators and victims of crime. Generally limited income means you have to rent rather than buy.
I’ve done both-and the only time I’ve ever had to use my insurance was for flooding in the house I happen to own.
And all the times I rented were in high crime areas-student apartments-and the one house I rented for my first year in ministry wasn’t in the most stable of neighborhoods.
My favorite “statistics” quote comes from the Direct TV ads.
“90% of all statistics can be made to say anything. 50% of the time.”
Priceless.
When I was a psych major at Iu I remember having to take “sadistics;” as we called it. I learned early on that any researcher could massage their data to get the results they wanted.
And part of that massaging was deciding if they wanted to use the mean, median, or mode of any research group.
“could”?!?
Oooh! I love that one. (Sales & Management) People seem to hate it when I ask if their figure was the mean or median, though…
Yes, “could,” because there are researchers out there who legitimately represent what their research has discovered-even if it ends up being the opposite of what they wanted to find.
But suffice it to say there are plenty of easy ways for researchers to “bend” the truth-and many do.
Oh, those would be the “unemployed” researchers then?
Not “bending”, but rather “massaging the data”.
The performance pressures of research driven institutions is such that appearing to be “wrong” about one’s hypothesis that the “sky is blue” is a ticket to academic oblivion (at least in the social sciences).
Obviously, it’s my opinion that anybody in academia who claims differently is wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Sadly, research isn’t allowed to “discover” much in the social sciences anymore. It’s just variations of “proving” that the “sky is, in fact, blue”.
Yeah, it was partially that tension that drove me from a psychology related career to the ministry. Senior year I worked in a psych lab coding research into a computer-before the days of Windows, when you had to know what all the F-keys were. The research that was being done was great-it was about creating support networks for families whose child had recently been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (a genetic, fatal disease). The researcher had direct access to all families who were being treated at Riley, and met with the families at time of diagnosis, three months, six months, and then after that on a yearly basis-to see how they were coping. But the way the questions were worded, and what they chose to ask and not ask (like “do you blame God”-the only “faith” question asked on the whole inventory, but no questions on if their faith community was offering them support. They did ask about other social agencies and the amount of support they received from them) directed the way the data came out. I’m sure Dr. Quittner got the results she wanted.
The classic work in this regard is
‘How to Lie With Statistics’
The problem with some researchers is that they are perfectly happy to develop statistics ‘proving’ that the sky is, in fact, green.
And falling, as well.