Comment 1

The strategic placement of outliers can positively skew means in ways that can influence results in one way or another. This can be useful in advertising when a company is trying to convince potential buyers to purchase their product. Measures of central tendencies (median, mean, and mode) alone may not provide the information necessary to properly interpret data. Central tendencies measure the center of a given data set. This is why it is important to consider the source and look at measures of dispersion (difference scores, range, variance, and standard deviation). Measures of dispersion reflect how different the numbers are within the data. This gives a better indication of how “values in a sample are dispersed around the mean” (Grove & Daisha, 2017, p. 293). These values will indicate if a data set is homogeneous or heterogeneous.

Vinyl Chloride is used in many common items like bedpans, IV bags, tubing and credit cards to name a few. It is found in so many items that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) studied the effects of vinyl chloride to be sure that it was safe for use. In the article Vinyl chloride: a case study of data suppression and misrepresentation (2005), the authors discovered that the EPA used information from the chemical industry and underreported the incidence of cancer surrounding vinyl chloride. The reports used suppressed data about other forms of cancer and only focused on liver cancer (Sass, Castleman &Wallinga, 2005).

Comment 2

Statistics is needed at every stage of the research process beginning from the contemplative stage till the end. Statistics is used obtain reliable results. However, graphics and statistics can be used to misrepresent data. The inappropriate use of the statistical method can cut into time and cost. It can also be misleading to other research projects as well as the audience. However, it is through misrepresentation that cause convincing arguments for some audiences.  Graphics/statistics can be used to misrepresent data by deliberately designing the results in a biased way. A way that the creator of the results wants the audience to think. Typically, such statistics are convincing. Furthermore, inappropriate use of statistics can be found in every stage of a medical research related to data analysis; design of the experiment, data collection and pre-processing, analysis method and implementation, and interpretation. Misrepresent statistics can be seen daily in reality. For example, a real estate office that is in a slowly growing market would show the housing prices over time, but only use a small segment of the prices. Say that the median prices are growing from $160k to $170k over 3 years. If you graph that from $0 to $200k, the line is going to look very flat. If you graph it from $150k to $170k, the difference is going to more dramatic and more likely to get you to sell your home with them.