Question

Normative data is useful for doctors, teachers and parents to better understand aspects of a child’s development (i.e., physical, cognitive). However, some individuals may use these norms to demonstrate their superiority to others, which can bring others down. How might we strike a better balance between using useful statistical information in a way that primarily brings people up, as opposed to creating an opportunity to bring people down?

Answer 1

1.

(a) The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions.

(b) Example-

• The health dimension is assessed by life expectancy at birth,
• the education dimension is measured by mean of years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and more and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age.
• The standard of living dimension is measured by gross national income per capita.
• The HDI uses the logarithm of income, to reflect the diminishing importance of income with increasing GNI. The scores for the three HDI dimension indices are then aggregated into a composite index using geometric mean.

(c) 2.

Statistical data was "information with confirmation" and "many people may claim many things, but if you have statistics you will know the reality".Statistics plays a significant and vital role in various aspects of our society including among others policy-making processes. They are needed for assessing the current situation, objectives setting, targets, as well as measuring progress and development.

3. Strengthening national statistical capability is therefore necessary to enable countries to satisfy their own needs. training helps in enhancing statisticians’ capabilities to achieve their goals in the changing and dynamic environment in which they operate.

4. the discipline of statistics has contended with its evolving place in society and shifting (and often inaccurate) public perceptions. Before statistics was a recognized scientific discipline, the word implied the development and use of official information on states and government.

5. The culture of the United States today, with its money economy, weights and measures, and tax laws, provides the social scientist with perhaps a hundred times as many statistical facts as the ethnologist can obtain from his pre-literate and pre-industrial informants or from the amount of direct observation which they permit him to make.

it should serve as an incentive to ethnologists to obtain quantitative data on the breeding of human populations, and at the same time emphasizes the need for more cooperation among the different subdivisions of anthropology.

6.  The symposium on “the use of statistical models to interpret data on human population genetics” held jointly by Anthropology and the Biometric Society