Question

Create your own example of a misleading statistic. Explain the context of the data, the source of the data, the sampling method that you used (or would use) to collect the data, and the (misleading) conclusions that would be drawn from your example. Be specific in explaining how the statistic is misleading.

Answer 1

A misleading statistic can be due to selective bias, small sample, biased response or many other reasons.

An example is where I tried to find if being in sports team make children taller. For this I compared two different populations of a school one with students in playing basketball at school and other not playing.

I used random sampling where I took a random sample from basketball playing students and another from students not playing.

I reached to a conclusion that the height of the students playing basket ball is significantly higher than of those not playing and thus being in sports team indeed makes children taller.

Only later I realized that the study was biased and misleading because someone told me that taller players are preferred when selecting them for basketball teams.