Quote:
Originally Posted by QuickSilver  <puts on lecture pants>
There are two ways that number could be misleading. First, we are looking for the % of people under thirty who have pets and give them up. What we have a stat for is, of the number of pets surrendered, how many belonged to people under thirty.
One quick way to look at this is to look at the breeds of dogs currently in shelters - this does not necessarily reflect the ratio of breeds out in the world.
Here's another way. Let's be optimistic and say that only 1% of people surrender their dogs. In that case, even if people < 30 surrender at almost twice the rate of people of people > 30, any given person < 30 with a pet is very unlikely to surrender.
Or this way. Let's say that people < 30 are much more likely to adopt dogs than people > 30. For the sake of example, let's be extreme, and say they are ten times more likely to adopt dogs. In that case, all other things being equal, people < 30 would be surrendering 10x as many dogs as everyone else. In that case, the fact that surrendered dogs were 2x as likely to be from a person < 30 would actually speak very well for the young'ns: it would show that as a group, they were LESS likely to surrender than older folks.
Not necessarily saying this is true, just that statistics are tricky. A great little read is "How to Lie With Statistics". Very eye opening (and short). |
Actually, it's not easy at all to lie in statistics, but percentages are not really statistics. If you do a statistical test on percentages, you get a statistic, and you can learn if the results are accurate with so many degrees of probability. People confuse percentages with statistics, but percentages do give us some indication of things, if we understand how the information was gathered. I agree with you it's very easy to mislead people with percentages, that’s why you have to know where the information is coming from, or if the group has an agenda.
As I commented on another thread the stats in this case
do not imply that most people under 30 year old relinquish their pets, the stats only indicate that people under thirty are the most likely to relinquish their pets. Anytime a number is over 50% you can use the word "most." At 62% you can use the word most. But you cannot make sweeping generalizations that this is true everywhere, unless you really read the facts on the study and how it was taken.