| Topic: | Not 'estimates' | |
| Posted by: | Thomas Barry | |
| Date/Time: | 11/07/13 19:25:00 |
| ""If they are just estimates, how accurate are they and do people therefore not have a right to challenge them? "" They aren't just estimates, though - the one that really stood out was on teenage pregnancy, which is known *precisely* because all births are registered by law*, yet people are still not even close - estimating that 1 in 7 u16 year olds have a child each year. Work that out for, say, a 1200 pupil secondary school like Chiswick. So there'll be around 1000 pupils 11-16 or younger, in 5 year groups about 200 each. Assuming 50% are girls and only 13-15 year old girls are having babies, the number of girls possibly having babies per year u16 is about 300, the number of girls in three year groups. Now, if 15% really got pregnant there'd be 45 babies born *per year* to pupils in the school. By the time they got to 16 a large number of the girls taking GCSEs would be mothers. I'm sure if you asked people how many under 16s becoming single mothers they knew of at their local secondary they wouldn't say 45 a year, but that's what they're implying in the response to the survey. A lot of this is people being bad at maths, of course, but it's just staggeringly wrong, 25x out. That's not a difference of opinion, it's a serious level of ignorance that people are not only apparently unaware of but seemingly trying to defend under the erroneous belief that counting the legally-mandated registration of births is somehow equivalent in accuracy to pulling numbers out of your backside. Why? Basically you're entitled to your opinions, but not your own facts. * Official birth statistics : http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-294336 |