Sunday, November 04, 2007

Jumping to incorrect conclusions pt.1

Not that there are likely more parts to follow...

There's a study entitled "Depression among Adults Employed Full-Time, by Occupational Category" over here. Very nice to see that 'Life, physical and social science' is near rock-bottom when it comes having been depressed between 2004 and 2006. The only happier bunch of people are those working in "Engineering, Architecture and surveyors". The last table shows that both males and females are happiest in 'Life, physical and social science'. Hold on, they score lower in the overall score table. Now let's jump in a completely scientifically incorrect manner: For these lines of work, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as there aren't too many women around to make you depressed. If you take the numbers of the two mentioned categories, you can work out that the ration men:women is. For the sciences it's 1.3:1 and for the Architects etc it's 6.8:1. Fewer women, lower overall depression rate. But why not the other way round? Are the men depressing the women and driving up the female depression rate, compensating the fact that there are less of them? No, there are no men in "Personal care and Service" and still women have a depression rate higher than the depression rate of males in any occupational category...
And that's how to draw completely wrong conclusions (on my part) based on what might be valid data (haven't looked into it that well).