Employment Discrimination and Statistics: The Art Versus the Science
July 29, 2004Someone emailed me with the following question: “I’d like to know how practitioners go about collecting the complex data used in statistical analyses.” The question is a great one!
I would contend that this is where the “art” comes into the play;
the statistical analyses are more the science part of the process.
The collection of data may be fairly routine; organizations should, and often do, maintain electronic or paper files to document hiring, firing, promotion, disciplinary actions, and so on. Perhaps the more challenging issue is when the data are not in a quantitative form (e.g., reasons for termination or reasons for not hiring someone). When the data are in a qualitative form, the expert needs to develop a coding system for the data. That is the “art” part of the process.
Hey, keep the questions and comments coming in!
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Comment by George
From the lawyer perspective, we fight over this during the “discovery” process.
The judge decides the scope of data made available to the opposing party if the attorneys can’t work it out.
Typical questions here might be how many years’ data, which job classifications, and which locations.