Population averages always attract a lot of attention, but are not always useful. and inequalities can be more compelling. It takes more skill, and sometimes more advanced techniques to get to this heterogeneity, but ultimately pays off by being closer to the truth. An example from a recently published paper on housing histories, is that south africa rcs data on average, people in England over 50 have lived in an owned house for about half of the first 50 years of their life. This average hides the large variation in duration of home ownership (see fig 1 below), ranging from a large share of people who have lived in owned housing all their life, to a large group of people who have never lived in owned housing. It’s clear that the average misrepresents the actual experience of people with home ownership substantially, and that a more complex picture gives more insight into what is actually happening.
Data impact
As this last example shows, data can be a powerful tool in illustrating and addressing social inequalities. It can help use our sociological imagination, to distinguish between personal troubles and societal issues, by investigating how common certain “troubles” are, and to who they happen more often. Importantly, data of good quality can help us to gain knowledge of the world that goes beyond our own experience, and help us to make inference about society. Although data are not objective in an absolutist sense, and the result of complicated mechanisms of exclusion and selection (through what the sampling frame is, the participation rate in the study, the quality of the interviewers and the type of questions asked), they can help us to check to what extent our intuitions about society hold.