Sometimes, current events move quickly, and data changes just as rapidly. This has been the case with the American housing market over the last several years, and, very recently, with the COVID-19 pandemic.
During these times when there’s a rapid influx of ever-changing information, it becomes more important than ever to be knowledgeable and responsible about navigating the news, and reading and interpreting the data that comes with it. That’s why we’ve made it a point to create and publish a guide to conscious data consumption, highlighting key components to understanding data, and providing context to keep in mind to make sure that you can extract the most accurate facts possible.
Over the past few years, we’ve revisited the topic of responsible data consumption, pairing it with timely and relevant data topics.
Our first guide to conscious data consumption was published in June, 2017 and focused on the topic of vacancy rates in Detroit—and how it’s important to be careful when reading numbers related to a topic, because different numbers on the same topic can convey very different information!
This guide focuses on five important aspects of numbers to keep in mind when reading or reporting data:
- Scope–the magnitude of data collection. This includes who data was collected from, how many entities data was collected from, and how long data collection took.
- Geography–where the data collection took place. The precision of geographic boundaries is very important for an accurate understanding of numbers.
- Availability–whether current and relevant data on the topic actually exists, and whether the raw data and methodology for collecting it are publicly available for users to check the numbers and accuracy of the analyses or aggregations.
- Scale–the geographic granularity at which the data is reported. For instance, is it collected at the address-level? City-level? State-level? How broad the collection is makes a huge difference in how useful the data is for a given purpose.
- Source/Methods–understanding how the data is collected, and especially how survey questions are asked to collect data, is essential for determining if there is bias present in the data, and what information needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Our next piece on responsible data consumption, posted in late 2019, covered the importance of considering reliability measures when interpreting data. This blog uses some data from the American Community Survey as a prominent real-world example for demonstrating margin of error and confidence intervals, and how they impact the accuracy of data taken from population samples.
In April 2020, the constant and ever-changing data-charged news from the pandemic prompted us to revisit the topic of conscious data consumption. This time, we focused on tips for understanding data, especially in a rapidly shifting landscape.
These tips are important to keep in mind when making decisions or forming opinions based on any published data or analysis:
We then took a deeper dive into the importance of context for understanding data and making it more actionable. We focused on pandemic data once again, this time stressing the importance of per capita data when it comes to accurately presenting population-based data such as the number of COVID-19 cases in a given area.
Having context in addition to the data is essential for understanding the significance of a set of numbers, as well as for measuring how a situation is progressing, and the best way to take any necessary action.
Our sources for understanding data better and using it responsibly have become integral to our conversations about pandemic data in particular. There’s even a section devoted to guides to responsible data consumption on D3’s pandemic portal.
We also led a virtual workshop in partnership with Co.act Detroit in May 2020 based on our tips for responsible data consumption. This marked the first of several presentations on the topic.
In June 2020, the same workshop from the previous month was presented as a webinar to a group of high schoolers through the Upward Bound program. The data used for this presentation was related to the pandemic and most of the attendees found the examples to be relatable and had lots of questions. The responsible data consumption tips helped them to refine which questions they really wanted to ask.
This March, we presented a Responsible Data Consumption webinar in partnership with Co.act Detroit once again. This presentation used the upcoming release of 2020 Census data as an updated data example.
In the future, we plan to continue conversations and workshops about responsible data consumption, always looking for ways to make the data examples current and relevant, and answer questions that community members have.
We are always open to feedback and ideas for additional data topics. If you’ve got a topic you’d like to know more about, feel free to reach out to us via AskD3!