Data

I ' m not talking about the android science officer, although that would be an interesting subject. I ' m talking about facts or statistics gathered together for reference or analysis, as the dictionary would have it.  We recently had a commenter who pointed out that the large majority of firearm homicides in the U.S. are not in the context of mass shootings; and that they are perpetrated with handguns, not long guns. This is true! But how did he know it?  He knew it because CDC ' s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control maintains theNational Violent Death Reporting System, which pools information from multiple sources. You will see that NCIPC also maintains other data systems. What these systems can tell us is of course limited -- it depends on what data elements exist in the questionnaires on which they depend, which are necessarily closed-ended, check the box type questions -- but this sort of quantitative information can tells us a lot about prevalence and patterns, and be combined with more in-depth, qualitative inquiry to develop a rich understanding of social problems. The founders recognized the need for good, quantitative information about the population so they put the decennial census in the constitution.  One rationale was just to count people for purposes of apportioning the House and electoral college, but from earliest days the census asked about gender, some concept of race (which changed over the decades) and of course...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs