For this assignment, you will discuss how Christian Principles can be applied to ethical issues in statistics.

Ethical considerations arise when you are deciding what results to include in a report. You should document both good and bad results. In addition, when making oral presentations and presenting written reports, you need to give results in a fair, objective, and neutral manner. Unethical behavior occurs when you selectively fail to report pertinent findings that are detrimental to the support of a particular position.

Often individuals unaware of how to construct appropriate graphs violate these guidelines.

Some applications, including Excel, tempt you to create “pretty” charts that may be fancy in

their designs but that represent unwise choices. For example, making a simple pie chart fancier

by adding exploded 3D slices is unwise as this can complicate a viewer’s interpretation of the

data. Uncommon chart choices such as doughnut, radar, surface, bubble, cone, and pyramid

charts may look visually striking, but in most cases they obscure the data.

Ethical issues can arise when any statements related to probability are presented to the public,

particularly when these statements are part of an advertising campaign for a product or service.

Unfortunately, many people are not comfortable with numerical concepts (see reference 5) and

tend to misinterpret the meaning of the probability. In some instances, the misinterpretation is

not intentional, but in other cases, advertisements may unethically try to mislead potential

customers.

One example of a potentially unethical application of probability relates to advertisements

for state lotteries. When purchasing a lottery ticket, the customer selects a set of numbers

(such as 6) from a larger list of numbers (such as 54). Although virtually all participants

know that they are unlikely to win the lottery, they also have very little idea of how unlikely it

is for them to select all 6 winning numbers from the list of 54 numbers. They have even less

of an idea of the probability of winning a consolation prize by selecting either 4 or 5 winning

numbers.

Given this background, you might consider a recent commercial for a state lottery that

stated, “We won’t stop until we have made everyone a millionaire” to be deceptive and possibly

unethical. Do you think the state has any intention of ever stopping the lottery, given the

fact that the state relies on it to bring millions of dollars into its treasury? Is it possible that the

lottery can make everyone a millionaire? Is it ethical to suggest that the purpose of the lottery

is to make everyone a millionaire?

Another example of a potentially unethical application of probability relates to an

investment newsletter promising a 90% probability of a 20% annual return on investment.

To make the claim in the newsletter an ethical one, the investment service needs to (a) explain

the basis on which this probability estimate rests, (b) provide the probability

statement in another format, such as 9 chances in 10, and (c) explain what happens to the investment in the 10% of the cases in which a 20% return is not achieved (e.g., is the entire investment lost?).

These are serious ethical issues. If you were going to write an advertisement for the state lottery that ethically describes the probability of winning a certain prize, what would you say?

If you were going to write an advertisement for the investment newsletter that ethically states the probability of a 20% return on an investment, what would you say?

Ethical considerations arise with respect to coverage error, nonresponse error, sampling error, and measurement error. Coverage error can result in selection bias and becomes an ethical issue if particular groups or individuals are purposely excluded from the frame so that the survey results are more favorable to the survey’s sponsor. Nonresponse error can lead to nonresponse bias and becomes an ethical issue if the sponsor knowingly designs the survey so that particular groups or individuals are less likely than others to respond. Sampling error becomes an ethical issue if the findings are purposely presented without reference to sample size and margin of error so that the sponsor can promote a viewpoint that might otherwise be inappropriate. Measurement error becomes an ethical issue in one of three ways: (1) a survey sponsor chooses leading questions that guide the responses in a particular direction; (2) an interviewer, through mannerisms and tone, purposely creates a Hawthorne effect or otherwise guides the responses in a particular direction; or (3) a respondent willfully provides false information.

Ethical issues also arise when the results of nonprobability samples are used to form conclusions about the entire population. When you use a nonprobability sampling method, you need to explain the sampling procedures and state that the results cannot be generalized beyond the sample.

Ethical issues related to the selection of samples and the inferences that accompany them can occur in several ways. The major ethical issue relates to whether confidence interval estimates are provided along with the point estimates. Providing a point estimate without also including the confidence interval limits (typically set at 95%), the sample size used, and an interpretation

of the meaning of the confidence interval in terms that a person untrained in statistics can understand raises ethical issues. Failure to include a confidence interval estimate might mislead the user of the results into thinking that the point estimate is all that is needed to predict the population characteristic with certainty.

When media outlets publicize the results of a political poll, they often overlook including this information. Sometimes, the results of a poll include the sampling error, but the sampling error is often presented in fine print or as an afterthought to the story being reported. A fully ethical presentation of poll results would give equal prominence to the confidence levels, sample size, sampling error, and confidence limits of the poll.

When you prepare your own point estimates, always state the interval estimate in a prominent place and include a brief explanation of the meaning of the confidence interval. In addition, make sure you highlight the sample size and sampling error.

Ethical Issues

You need to distinguish between poor research methodology and unethical behavior. Ethical considerations arise when the hypothesis-testing process is manipulated. Some of the areas where ethical issues can arise include the use of human subjects in experiments, the data collection method, the type of test (one-tail or two-tail test), the choice of the level of significance, the cleansing and discarding of data, and the failure to report pertinent findings.

http://www.westga.edu/~bquest/2001/consultant.htm

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1987/PSCF9-87Geertsema.html