![]() "You can take any data set, and if you cut it apart in a number of ways, you'll find something eventually. Only one of the five variables could be correlated to increased longevity of patients after heart surgery thus, Sloan considered the single association to be insignificant after all, the other four variables did not corroborate the researchers' assertion that prayer increased the longevity of patients. 2 Sloan pointed out that the researchers initially wanted to consider five variables however, upon looking at the data, they decided to consider the variables independently. ![]() 1 Although the correlations may be supported by statistical analysis, specious conclusions may be drawn, then publicized, thereby misleading the consumer.Īn interesting example of data dredging is the conclusion of researchers who studied the effects of prayer on the longevity of heart surgery patients, according to Richard Sloan, a Columbia University psychologist. ![]() The trouble is that many of these 'patterns' will simply be a product of random fluctuations and will not represent any underlying structure," according to J.H. Often the culprit creating these contradictory bits of wisdom is a flawed method of data interpretation dubbed "data dredging" by its critics.ĭata dredging is "the process of trawling through data in the hope of identifying patterns.a sufficiently exhaustive search will certainly throw up patterns of some kind by definition, data that are not simply uniform have differences which can be interpreted as patterns. ![]() ![]() Consumers are often inundated by studies touted in the media, promoting certain foods and disparaging others, sometimes frustrating people with credible-sounding but contradictory advice. ![]()
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