Comparing apples and oranges: taking data from two different surveys - when you already have all the data you need in one of them

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At LinkedIn Pulse on March 27, 2023 there is a long article (almost 4900 words) by Ella Ray titled Public Speaking or Death? Why Most People Would Choose the Latter.

 

In her first section, she says that:

 

“You’re not alone. In fact, studies show that 75% of people have a fear of public speaking. That’s more than the number of people who are afraid of spiders, snakes, and even death!

 

This fear is known as ‘glossophobia,’ and it can manifest as a fear of speaking in front of large groups of people, fear of being judged or evaluated, or fear of making mistakes.

 

According to a 2020 survey by Chapman University, 20.3% of Americans are afraid or very afraid of dying. The fear of death is also known as ‘thanatophobia,’ and it can manifest as a fear of one’s own death, a fear of the death of loved ones, or a fear of the unknown aspects of death.

 

This means that Americans are more afraid of speaking in public than of death.”

 

But, when you look up the Chapman University blog post titled America’s Top Fears 2020/2021, you will instead find these three percentages listed:

 

FEAR

People I Love Dying: 58.5%, ranked #2 of 95  

Dying: 29.3%, ranked #53

Public Speaking: 29.0%, ranked #54

 

Twice as many people feared People I Love Dying as feared Public Speaking! And the percentage for Dying (29.3, not 20.3) just was very slightly above that for Public Speaking (29.0, not the 75 from elsewhere).

 

Ella said that Americans are more afraid of public speaking than death, and one of the sections in her article is titled Why Is Public Speaking So Scary? That’s not what data in the Chapman Survey tell us. People actually are only slightly afraid of public speaking. On September 26, 2021 I blogged about how Fear of public speaking was only ranked #54 out of 95 fears in the 2020/2021 Chapman Survey of American Fears. In that post I showed how to use the detailed results in their survey to calculate Fear Scores on a scale from one to four, where 1 = Not Afraid at All, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, and 4 = Very Afraid.

 

Those scores are as follows:

 

People I Love Dying:  2.744

Dying: 2.072

Public Speaking: 2.023

 

Cartoon images of an apple and an orange both came from Openclipart.

 

UPDATE April 18, 2023

I posted a comment on Ella's article with a link to this blog post, but she deleted it.