The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data, courtesy of Redditor fevaah , showing old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't). If this idea was help...
Scott Ketter's "Methods can matter: Where web surveys produce different results than phone interviews"
Pew recently revisited the question of how survey modality can influence survey responses. In particular, this survey used both web and telephone based surveys to ask participants about their attitudes towards politicians, perceptions of discrimination, and their satisfaction with life. As summarized in the article, the big differences are: "1) People expressed more negative views of politicians in Web surveys than in phone surveys." "2) People who took phone surveys were more likely than those who took Web surveys to say that certain groups of people – such as gays and lesbians, Hispanics, and blacks – faced “a lot” of discrimination ." "3) People were more likely to say they are happy with their family and social life when asked by a person over the phone than when answering questions on the Web ." The social psychologist in me likes this as an example of the Social Desirability Bias. When spea...