News Story 10, described in the Appendix, is titled “Churchgoers live longer, study finds.” One of the statements in the news story is “women who attend religious services regularly are about 80 percent as likely to die as those not regularly attending.” Discuss the extent to which each of the three “common ways the media misrepresent statistics about risk” from Section 12.3, listed as parts a–c, apply to this quote.
a. The baseline risk is missing.
b. The time period of the risk is not identified.
c. The reported risk is not necessarily your risk. For Exercises 36 and 37: In Original Source 10, “Religious attendance and cause of death over 31 years” (not available on the companion website), the researchers used a complicated statistical method to assess relative risk by adjusting for factors such as education and income. The resulting numbers are called “relative hazards” instead of relative risks (abbreviated RH), but have the same interpretation as relative risk. The relative risks and increased risks in Exercises 36 and 37 are from Table 4 of the article. Write a sentence or two that someone with no training in statistics would understand presenting each of these in context.