Unreliable Report

Following our discussion last Thursday, I was, much like Paul, a bit skeptical about the reliability of the data included in the “North Carolina Minority Fact Sheet.” The health trends shown for Latinos deviated from the general population and other minorities on some key issues (cause of death, chronic disease prevalence, etc). Initially we attempted to make sense of these deviations, but in the end, a more skeptical conclusion won out: that the data published in this report was unreliable.

At one point, even the idea that state officials had no incentive to correct positive data was stated. The fact that state budget decisions are made based off these statistics makes their apparent inaccuracy even more surprising. The take-home message of this discussion would have to be: don’t take official reports by face-value alone; an in-depth analysis is necessary for any sort of statistic.