Statistical analysis in news reporting

Statistics in News Reports

According to a recent article published on The Chart, CNN.com's comprehensive medical blog authored by Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Elizabeth Cohen, the number of American children who fall victim to accidental death each year has plummeted during the last decade. The article, entitled Accidental Death Rate for Children Falls, details the dramatic decrease in the "death rate from unintentional injuries among children and adolescents from birth to age 19" (Gupta M.D. & Cohen, 2012), and provides a litany of statistical evidence to support this claim. As is always the case with the media's deployment of statistics, scientific records and other numerical support, a careful reader should avoid taking supposed facts and figures at face value without first subjecting the data to careful scrutiny. Until any statistical presentation can withstand the reader's rigorous examination, any conclusions drawn from the data in question must be considered to be suspect, as it may have been influenced by the author's conscious or subconscious bias, an unintended misinterpretation of the figures or simply lazy reporting techniques.

In the case of Accidental Death Rate for Children Falls, it is important to begin by determining the source of the statistics being presented. The author's assertion that the accidental death rate for children has "plunged almost 30% from 2000-2009" is directly attributed "to a Vital Signs report released Monday by the CDC" (Gupta M.D. & Cohen, 2012). By referencing statistics published within an official report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal agency operating under the auspices of the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, the authors are firmly establishing the legitimacy of the statistics included in their article. Typically, if an article posted on a news website's blog made the claim that "every hour, one child dies from an unintentional injury in the United States" or declared that accidental death is "the leading cause of death for children and adolescents aged 1 to 19, and the fifth leading cause of death for newborns and infants less than a year old" (Gupta M.D. & Cohen, 2012), a savvy reader would remain rightfully dubious. The governmental nature of the source, however, lends a certain air of credibility to these claims that would be left lacking without the aid of official sanction. This legitimacy is enhanced after a review of the science underlying the statistical assembly, as the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Unintentional Injury Deaths Among Persons Aged 0-19 Years in the United States for 2000-2009 is by far the recognized authority on the subject at hand. Any reasonable reader would also be forced to deem these statistical claims valid when informed that the "CDC analyzed 2000 -- 2009 mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System by age group, sex, race/ethnicity, injury mechanism, and state" (Vital signs: Unintentional, 2012).