Common Errors in Statistics (and How to Avoid Them), 4th Edition
by Phillip I. Good, James W. Hardin
THE SOCCER DATA
When his children were young, Dr. Hardin coached youth soccer (players of age 5) and recorded the total number of goals scored for the top five teams during the eight-game spring 2001 season in College Station, Texas. The total numbers of goals scored per team were 16 (team 1), 22 (team 2), 14 (team 3), 11 (team 4), and 18 (team 5). There are many ways we can describe these outcomes to the reader. In text above, we simply communicated the results in words.
A more effective presentation would be to write “the total numbers of goals scored by Teams 1 through 5 were 16, 22, 14, 11, and 18 respectively.” The College Station Soccer Club assigned the official team names as Team 1, Team 2, etc.1 Improving on this textual presentation, we could also write, “with the team number as the subscript the total numbers of goals were 222, 185, 161, 143, and 114.” This presentation improves communication by ordering the outcomes. With these particular data, the reader will naturally want to know the order.
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