This post by publisher Rex Hammock points to one of my pet gripes about journalists--they love numbers but usually fail miserably on context for the number and meaning and derivation of the numbers. I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper that didn't hype a twisted interpretation of some bogus survey. (I should have never taken that graduate school class on research methodology, I guess.)
Math-challenged reporters are more likely to re-print suspect research, study shows. A [OE]rock stars die young[base '] meme is blanketing the web this morning. As the findings of the survey sound astoundingly obvious, I predict they will be proven wrong. Frankly, anyone who has ever watched an episode of VH-1[base ']s Behind the Music could have come up with the same findings.
However, here[base ']s one obvious flaw in the coverage of the research: many of the news organizations covering it, like the BBC[base ']s linked above, have headlines like, [base "]Why rock and roll stars die young[per thou] and the crux of the stories is this: rock stars live fast and die young. However, the story reports that the research reveals drug and alcohol problems accounted for one in four deaths: or, with my emphasis: ONLY one in four deaths. (If you watch Behind the Music, you would estimate that four-in-four such deaths are alcohol or drug-related!) In reality (as opposed to Behind the Music conventional wisdom), to determine whether or not [base "]a fast lifestyle[per thou] is the reason for rock star deaths, one would have to compare such statistics to the causes of deaths in other groups of non-rock stars who share all other characteristics, especially age. If, for example, a group of non-rock stars the same age die at the same rates from alcohol or drug-related reasons, then it invalidates the [base "]live fast[per thou] basis underlying the BBC story[base ']s lede.
More problematic is the lack of any questioning by reporters regarding the foundation of this research. How were the 1,050 U.S. and European [base "]rock stars[per thou] selected to be in the research group? The findings of this study could be heavily influenced by how that selection process was carried out. Perhaps there is a legitimate measure of [base "]rock stardom[per thou] [~] (cumulative record sales by month x of an artists[base '] commercial career?) [~] but if anywhere along the process, a group of [base "]experts[per thou] decided who the pool of [base "]rock stars[per thou] are, then the research is suspect. Why? Because the rock star status of some artists often inflates after a premature death. If the basis for inclusion in such a list of [base "]rock stars[per thou] is based on criteria other than that which can be quantified at a specific point in an artists[base '] career [~] before death [~] then it could skew the sample in a way that could potentially cause it to have an inflated number of [base "]dead[per thou] rock stars.
[rexblog.com: Rex Hammock's weblog]
2:31:00 PM 
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