[Apperently the link provided to the orignal article is no longer working at all- apologies for the incoinvenance]
How to settle arguments about gender politics while having dinner with
your relatives- statistic based reporting.
Ridiculous Facebook arguments can lead you in useful directions. In response
to an off color joke by family member about women drivers, I looked into whether
anyone had compelled any comparative data about gender and driving.
An editorial piece, written by
Chuck Tannert for MSN Autos, entitled “Who Are Better Drivers: Men or Women?”
attempts to settle the tired social debate over which sex is better behind the
wheel. I decided to analyse not only because of my own personal curiosity, but
also stories leading to discussions of feminism have been popping up in the
news more and more frequently.
I also think it would interesting, if doing this story for BC, to break
the data up by different areas of BC, because there is bound to be some variation
in the results given a larger more specific sample.
Overall I believe the data is explain in the article quite clearly. Compiling the ratios between men and women committing
different traffic violations, as well as the overall fatal crash rates broken
up by age and gender show the reader how the reporter came to that conculsion. However, this is some issues with the exact dating of the
data. The story itself has no date of publication and the fatal crash graph
time frame is cut off by an ad on the site.
Also the quality of the data is questionable
considering that part come from a third party study by a group called Quality
Planning, i think it would be better to have used a source more official, in
this case since it's an American story that would be the Department of Motor Vehicles.
I do think where the piece fails to convey the data effectively is in
the presentation. The table relating fatal crash data is clunky and crowded. It
would be easy for a reader to skim over it without absorbing the information
provided. If I were to solve this problem, I think it would be more effective
to have an interactive tool that would allow reader to input, for example, an
age group and then be presented with a comparison that was more visually
appealing.
If this piece was to be replicated for BC drivers I would suggest using
ICBC as a data source. Any ticket and record of violation do go through them,
and they are universal to all parts of the province- dealing with them would be
less complicated than individual police forces.
I also make this suggestion because other sources, such as Cansim and
StatCan only provide this data on a national scale.
There may be some restrictions applied to getting this data, but if only
provided with age, gender, type of violation, and number of accidents (fatal
and non-fatal), the journalist working on this story could do so without
infringing on anyone’s privacy.
Overall I believe doing a similar story could be very useful to BC
readers, but also I think it could be done more effectively than this particular
piece.
