As educators, we should not only aim to provide our students with technical skills, but should also help them develop life skills. In recent times there has been an increasing emphasis on communication skills, application skills and reporting skills, but we possibly have not yet sufficiently articulated the social issues associated with good data collection, analysis and reporting. We also need to demonstrate to the students, and through them to the community, the wide field of applicability of statistical techniques, and the need for viewing events from a numerate point of view (among others), in order to interpret what the events mean. There are many social issues that can and should be raised with our students, which can also be used to illustrate statistical techniques. Examples of this, particularly pertinent in South Africa, are issues such as HIV/AIDS, rights of women, etc. For example, HIV/AIDS can be used to discuss regression on indicator variables (HIV negative, HIV+, then later expand to symptomatic and non-symptomatic). This could then be combined with a few questions about whether the class thinks that mortality tables apply to them. This paper focuses on the questions: do statisticians have a social responsibility to students to include such issues among the technical issues, and what is the best way of doing this?
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education