Calame comes down on NYT for math in single women story

http://www.regrettheerror.com/2007/02/calame_comes_do.html

February 13, 2007

Calame comes down on NYT for math in single women story

New York Times public editor Byron Calame delivered another good column this past Sunday, this time offering a clear and necessary explanation/debunking of some fuzzy numbers in a Times story. (We say another because his December 31 column about a questionable abortion story was also an example of the kind of work that makes a powerful argument in favor of having a public editor.)
The story in question, "51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse," created quite a bit stir when it was published on January 16. As Eat The Press notes in its interesting and useful link-heavy round-up, shock-number trend stories like this are "instantly picked up all over the place, repackaged on front-pages throughout the country, repeated on news and talk shows, hashed over in the blogosphere." These stories are news that make news. So it's essential that the math be solid.
It's an oft-repeated maxim that journalists are bad at math. Sometimes, we simply take numbers offered to us and reprint them without giving a second look. Sometimes, we introduce errors through poor math or other mistakes. And sometimes, as it seems in this case, we use numbers that appear to make a better/more interesting story and fail to offer a full explanation of the logic and limitations of said numbers. People who read the fine print on this piece were surprised by what they found. As a result, they questioned the overall conclusions of the article. A little disclosure goes a long way. Calame does a good job investigating how the questionable numbers came to be printed and not fully explained, and he also includes details about how the Times plans to avoid this in the future:

In the wake of this controversy, Bill Keller, the executive editor, has decided to meet with staffers with expertise in statistics and demographics to create a “vetting network to help with the editing of articles dealing with those subjects,” Craig R. Whitney, an assistant managing editor and the standards editor, said Thursday.

That's good news. One more recommendation: introduce a math-related training program for staffers in order to increase the overall level of numeracy in the newsroom.

For those interested, go here and here to read some of the many math/numbers errors we've collected.

February 13, 2007 at 08:00 AM in Major Errors, Newspapers

January 16, 2007

51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse

By SAM ROBERTS

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

In addition, marriage rates among black women remain low. Only about 30 percent of black women are living with a spouse, according to the Census Bureau, compared with about 49 percent of Hispanic women, 55 percent of non-Hispanic white women and more than 60 percent of Asian women.

In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military or are institutionalized. But while most women eventually marry, the larger trend is unmistakable.

“This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives,” said Prof. Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. “Most of these women will marry, or have married. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage.”

Professor Coontz said this was probably unprecedented with the possible exception of major wartime mobilizations and when black couples were separated during slavery.

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, described the shift as “a clear tipping point, reflecting the culmination of post-1960 trends associated with greater independence and more flexible lifestyles for women.”

“For better or worse, women are less dependent on men or the institution of marriage,” Dr. Frey said. “Younger women understand this better, and are preparing to live longer parts of their lives alone or with nonmarried partners. For many older boomer and senior women, the institution of marriage did not hold the promise they might have hoped for, growing up in an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ era.”

Emily Zuzik, a 32-year-old musician and model who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, said she was not surprised by the trend.

“A lot of my friends are divorced or single or living alone,” Ms. Zuzik said. “I know a lot of people in their 30s who have roommates.”

Ms. Zuzik has lived with a boyfriend twice, once in California where the couple registered as domestic partners to qualify for his health insurance plan. “I don’t plan to live with anyone else again until I am married,” she said, “and I may opt to keep a place of my own even then.”

Linda Barth, a 56-year-old magazine editor in Houston who has never married, said, “I used to divide my women friends into single friends and married friends. Now that doesn’t seem to be an issue.”

Sheila Jamison, who also lives in the East Village and works for a media company, is 45 and single. She says her family believes she would have had a better chance of finding a husband had she attended a historically black college instead of Duke.

“Considering all the weddings I attended in the ’80s that have ended so very, very badly, I consider myself straight up lucky,” Ms. Jamison said. “I have not sworn off marriage, but if I do wed, it will be to have a companion with whom I can travel and play parlor games in my old age.”

Carol Crenshaw, 57, of Roswell, Ga., was divorced in 2005 after 33 years and says she is in no hurry to marry again.

“I’m in a place in my life where I’m comfortable,” said Ms. Crenshaw, who has two grown sons. “I can do what I want, when I want, with whom I want. I was a wife and a mother. I don’t feel like I need to do that again.”

Similarly, Shelley Fidler, 59, a public policy adviser at a law firm, has sworn off marriage. She moved from rural Virginia to the vibrant Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., when her 30-year marriage ended.

“The benefits were completely unforeseen for me,” Ms. Fidler said, “the free time, the amount of time I get to spend with friends, the time I have alone, which I value tremendously, the flexibility in terms of work, travel and cultural events.”

Among the more than 117 million women over the age of 15, according to the marital status category in the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey, 63 million are married. Of those, 3.1 million are legally separated and 2.4 million said their husbands were not living at home for one reason or another.

That brings the number of American women actually living with a spouse to 57.5 million, compared with the 59.9 million who are single or whose husbands were not living at home when the survey was taken in 2005.

Some of those situations, which the census identifies as “spouse absent” and “other,” are temporary, and, of course, even some people who describe themselves as separated eventually reunite with their spouses.

Over all, a larger share of men are married and living with their spouse — about 53 percent compared with 49 percent among women.

“Since women continue to outlive men, they have reached the nonmarital tipping point — more nonmarried than married,” Dr. Frey said. “This suggests that most girls growing up today can look forward to spending more of their lives outside of a traditional marriage.”

Pamela J. Smock, a researcher at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, agreed, saying that “changing patterns of courtship, marriage, and that we are living longer lives all play a role.”

“Men also remarry more quickly than women after a divorce,” Ms. Smock added, “and both are increasingly likely to cohabit rather than remarry after a divorce.”

The proportion of married people, especially among younger age groups, has been declining for decades. Between 1950 and 2000, the share of women 15-to-24 who were married plummeted to 16 percent, from 42 percent. Among 25-to-34-year-olds, the proportion dropped to 58 percent, from 82 percent.

“Although we can help people ‘do’ marriage better, it is simply delusional to construct social policy or make personal life decisions on the basis that you can count on people spending most of their adult lives in marriage,” said Professor Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”

Besse Gardner, 24, said she and her boyfriend met as college freshmen and started living together last April “for all the wrong reasons” — they found a great apartment on the beach in Los Angeles.

“We do not see living together as an end or even for the rest of our lives — it’s just fun right now,” Ms. Gardner said. “My roommate is someone I’d be thrilled to marry one day, but it just doesn’t make sense right now.”

Ms. Crenshaw said that some of the women in her support group for divorced women were miserable, but that she was surprised how happy she was to be single again.

“That’s not how I grew up,” she said. “That’s not how society thinks. It’s a marriage culture.”

Elissa B. Terris, 59, of Marietta, Ga., divorced in 2005 after being married for 34 years and raising a daughter, who is now an adult.

“A gentleman asked me to marry him and I said no,” she recalled. “I told him, ‘I’m just beginning to fly again, I’m just beginning to be me. Don’t take that away.’ ”

“Marriage kind of aged me because there weren’t options,” Ms. Terris said. “There was only one way to go. Now I have choices. One night I slept on the other side of the bed, and I thought, I like this side.”

She said she was returning to college to get a master’s degree (her former husband “didn’t want me to do that because I was more educated than he was”), had taken photography classes and was auditioning for a play.

“Once you go through something you think will kill you and it doesn’t,” she said, “every day is like a present.”

Ariel Sabar, Brenda Goodman and Maureen Balleza contributed reporting

The Public Editor

Can a 15-Year-Old Be a ‘Woman Without a Spouse’?

By BYRON CALAME

THE opening paragraph of the article sounded like grown-up stuff: “For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.”

It was a statistic that put the story on a fast track to the front page, providing a noteworthy benchmark for a well-established trend. But the new majority materialized only because The Times chose to use survey data that counted, as spouseless women, teenagers 15 through 17 — almost 90 percent of whom were living with their parents.

Major newspapers and broadcast and cable news programs picked up on this tipping point, spotted by Sam Roberts, a veteran Times reporter who writes frequently about census data. A few media outlets stopped to question the logic of including teenage females, before going on to discuss the Jan. 16 article’s interesting exploration of the “newfound freedom” for women that was reflected by the new majority.

Several readers, including some who perceived the article as an attack on family values, challenged the inclusion of 15-year-olds, in e-mails to me and in comments posted on the Web version of The Times. “The article is a little deceiving because it is based on the percentage of women 15 and older who are not married,” wrote one reader, noting that “it’s not even legal to marry at 15” in many states. I couldn’t agree more.

The failure to prominently and clearly explain the methodology of the survey used was one of several journalistic lapses that I found in the handling of this story. The single passing reference to the range of ages included in the overall data from the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey, or A.C.S., came below the midpoint of the article. Given the teenage “women” issue, editors should have made sure at least that the age range of the survey was more fully explained before the continuation of the article on an inside page.

But editors may have made the problem worse. I saw the top portion of a draft of the article prepared by Mr. Roberts in which the age range was first mentioned in the 10th paragraph. The first reference in the published story was in the 21st paragraph.

When readers did get to the mention of what ages were included, it was incorrect. It indicated that the numbers reflected A.C.S. data on “more than 117 million women over the age of 15.” Similarly, the footnote to the graphic accompanying the article said the data there were “for people over age 15.” Both mentions of the age cutoff were so minimal that some readers missed the supposed exclusion of 15-year-olds.

Mr. Roberts has now said that 15-year-olds were included in all the data in both the article and the graphic. But there hasn’t been any correction of the two misleading explanations indicating that the data were for females 16 and older.

When I began to look into reader concerns about the article shortly after it appeared, it became clear that there was confusion over the issue of 15-year-olds. Mr. Roberts initially told me, and wrote in an e-mail, that 15-year-olds had been excluded from the “raw numbers” cited in the article, mainly because he had discovered some states’ restrictions on marriage at that age. So the statements in the article and graphic that 15-year-olds were not counted seemed at first to be consistent with what Mr. Roberts had told me and the office of the standards editor last month.

My subsequent questions, however, led to Mr. Roberts’s eventual acknowledgment that 15-year-olds had been fully included in all the data. Seeking to explain that shift, he wrote in a Jan. 30 e-mail to me: “When I realized that nothing would change by eliminating 15-year-olds, I left the numbers as is, again for consistency.”

Actually, leaving out 15-year-olds would have cast statistical doubt on the new majority. A calculation done for me by Times consultants at the Queens College department of sociology in New York shows that the number of females 16 years old and older not living with a spouse in 2005 exceeded the total living with one, but by a small number that was well within the margin of error.

Mr. Roberts is now defending the inclusion of 15-year-olds on the basis of historical comparability and consistency. He points out that the Census Bureau has collected and reported marital data on them for decades — going back to a time when marriage at that age was more common than today. (Even the Census Bureau can recognize that times do change, however: it once included 14-year-olds in its marital status data, but no longer does so.)

Only one aspect of the methodology was adequately explained high up in the Jan. 16 article. Readers were advised that women living without a spouse — the new majority — included “a relatively small number” whose husbands were temporarily away from home serving in the military or out of town working, or who were institutionalized. The article never alerted readers, however, to the exclusion of the mostly spouseless females in “group quarters,” such as college dormitories; counting those residents would have tended to bolster the number of women living without a spouse and the new majority.

Readers could have been given a fuller and more realistic perspective on the 2005 data on women living without spouses, in addition to a presentation of basic historical data that provided consistency and comparability. With a long-acknowledged trend topping 50 percent by one count, the main thrust of the article was assessing the kind of women who constitute this new majority. And that should have included pointing out that almost 90 percent of the more than six million females ages 15 to 17 in the new majority are still living with their parents.

Common sense would also seem to have called for telling readers how many women above high school age were living without spouses in 2005. Simply subtracting the numbers for the A.C.S.’s 15-to-17 category from the total provides the data for females 18 and older. It shows that 48 percent of them were living without husbands — short of the 51 percent reached when high-school-age females were included — a fact that merited equal billing in the article. Eliminating all teenagers and counting only women 20 and older would have shown that 47 percent were living without a spouse in 2005, according to my math.

Consultants to The Times at Queens College can provide historical data on the percentages of females in various age categories who were living with, and without, a spouse. (They use samples of individual raw Census Bureau data that can vary slightly from the A.C.S. numbers.) The consultants gave me historical data for all females 15 and older, as well as all those 18 and older. My rough plotting of the percentages of females living without a spouse in each of the two age ranges since 1950 produced trend lines that were essentially parallel.

The eye-catching assertion that more women in America were living without a husband than with one obviously vaulted this article to Page One. “It is true that the 51 percent benchmark probably lifted this story onto the front page,” Jack Kadden, a deputy national editor who oversaw its preparation, wrote in an e-mail. “It is certainly what caught our attention.”

It was discouraging to find yet another article with an unusual angle that didn’t seem to encounter many skeptical editors as it made its way to the front page. “At the Page One meeting there was agreement that the story was especially newsworthy because of the for-the-first-time-more-living-alone-than-with-a-spouse angle,” Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, wrote to me in an e-mail. “No questions about the methodology or age categories were discussed.”

After dealing with three weeks of questions from readers and from me, Mr. Roberts on Monday expressed a little less certainty about the new majority trumpeted in the first paragraph of his article. He wrote to me: “I think the essence of the article remains accurate: that, depending on how one adjusts the census’s definition, about half — maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, depending on the age group — of American women are living without a spouse at any given time.”

Readers deserved this kind of more tempered perspective back on Jan. 16 — and a more tempered story, displayed on an inside page.

The public editor, Byron Calame, is the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly on the Sunday Op-Ed pages.