3 ms·
There are a lot of problems with this webpage. (EDIT: I am a bit wrong here, and I'm grateful to mthoms below for pointing it out!) It doesn't tell you how ea
by DanBC 6y ago
There are a lot of problems with this webpage.
(EDIT: I am a bit wrong here, and I'm grateful to mthoms below for pointing it out!)
It doesn't tell you how each country defines a death by suicide. It doesn't tell you if that definition has changed over time. It doesn't tell you whether they tried, nor how they've tried, to correct for different definitions of suicide. It talks about age-standardised rates, but doesn't tell you how they standardised for age. And then it puts it all together in very authoritative graphs and charts and invites the audience to draw conclusions and create a narrative and over-interpet the data.
"This country has a high suicide rate because of school pressure"; "that country has a high rate because there are lots of lonely young men", "this country has huge problems with alcohol dependency so of course their rate is higher". These may be true, but we can't tell from OurWorldInData.
I urge you to be cautious when reading this data, especially if you're comparing one country to another.
- mthoms 6y agoThe page does address the issues you speak of [0]. Having said that, I do agree that the disclaimer is critically important and should probably be placed at the beginning rather than the end of the document. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/suicide#data-quality https://ourworldindata.org/suicide#data-quality
- jeffbee 6y agoYup, this is a big issue in US data where a leading cause of death for otherwise-healthy age groups is "accidental poisoning" which is CDC-NCHS code for drug overdoses.