How can statistics be unethically manipulated? Outline the specific ethical considerations associated with using statistics for social data analysis.
What will be an ideal response?
Summary statistics can easily be used unethically, knowingly or not. When we summarize a distribution in a single number, even in two numbers, we are losing much information. Neither central tendency nor variation describes a distribution's overall shape. And taken separately, neither measure tells us about the other characteristic of the distribution (central tendency or variation). So reports using measures of central tendency should normally also include measures of variation. And we also should inspect the shape of any distribution for which we report summary statistics to ensure that the summary statistic does not mislead us because of an unusual degree of skewness.
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