A good JAMA article that demonstrates how to appropriately share relative and absolute risks.

TL:DR:

Sugary drinks might up your risk for oral cavity cancer (so says relative risk) but probably won't be the thing that kills you (so says absolute risk).

In depth:

I love teaching applied statistics, including showing my students how to identify and properly attention-grabbing examples of relative risk (1, 2). HOWEVER, relative and absolute risk aren't lying. But they can scare people, so I think it is important to share both calmly.

This example from JAMA Otolaryngology is a good example of how to responsibly share relative and absolute risk. It has a very calm, non-click bait article title:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/fullarticle/2831121

Cool. Also, thanks for using female research participants. Next, the results are described in a non-salacious manner, with the absolute risk in red and relative risk in blue.

How could you use this in class? Sharing relative risk isn't in and of itself unethical. Using it to scare people is questionable. This is a responsible way to convey information: Yes, sugar drinks are best avoided. However, heart disease is more likely to kill us (Americans) than oral cancer. Also, this data uses the Nurses Health Study which is a fascinating longitudinal study that has given us SOOOO much good health information.

You can also use this version of the results and ask your student to find the relative and absolute risks all on their own.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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