Factual Questions
by tdaxp ~ November 22nd, 2009
As I know, and am close to, numerous nurses who work with high-risk groups and have yet to receive the Pig Flu (H1N1) Vaccine, I would like to know the answer to the following questions
1. What is the correlation between an individual’s contributions to the Obama campaign and his or her probability of having received a Pig Flu vaccine shot?
2. What is the correlation between the average size of individual contributions to the Obama campaign for an organization, and the fraction of that organization’s workforce that have received a Pig Flu vaccine?
November 23rd, 2009 at 7:38 am
Got my shot. Gee whiz, that twenty bucks to the Obama campaign was a better long term investment than I thought!
November 23rd, 2009 at 7:39 am
Do you have a point, or are you pleading to anecdotes?
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:58 am
My point is that you might be on to something. The twenty bucks I speak of is the best investment I have ever made!
November 23rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Tough questions to answer.
I didn’t contribute to the Obama campaign and have not received an H1N1 flu shot. Does this mean I break the statistical analysis, being 0 for 0? Or does it mean that my anecdotal evidence is merely irrelevant.
I have a young nephew and a young niece who have received the shots, but I’m pretty sure that neither of them contributed to the Obama campaign. (At 4 and 1.5 years old, their discretionary spending is limited.) I wonder if they also break the statistical analysis.
But as I said, tough questions. I suspect, to have a fair shot at some kind of useful statistical analysis, rights to privacy in the case of #1 would limit the sampling size to an unusably small sampling. Of course this doesn’t preclude the use of statistics to prove whatever needs proving; so I’d say make up answers, which is about as good. No one else will have a sampling size that could lead to a refutation of your statistics, anyway.
#2 is a bit different, since certain public corporations and institutions probably need to keep track of, and report, usable information. OTOH, private organizations probably don’t need to report such things, so we default to the same difficulty we have in answer #1 statistically. Again, however, you can focus only on certain organization who do report the necessary information and, as is now accepted practice, use your results to create a universal statement of fact covering also the private institutions and organizations. I, for one, would like to know whether the 5GW organizations and various other secret societies in America have received a benefit from supporting Obama, so a study building a universal assessment upon a very small sampling of publicly traded corporations would come in handy.