Interviewing your data

Total suggested time: 5 minutes

Lecture: Treating data as a source

Suggested time: 5 minutes

As we will say a lot in this course, data is as fallible as any other source.

As journalists, our job is to interview our data. But we don’t have to be experts to do that. Start with small questions.

Here are a few:

• What do the descriptive statistics show?
  • Counts and sums – How many and how much.
  • Average – The sum of all values, divided by the number of values.
  • Median – The middle value of a sorted range of numbers. Also called the typical value.
  • Quartiles – Where the median breaks a sorted list into two halves, quartiles break up into four.
• How many times did something occur?
• Over what time period? Are there chronological patterns?
• What are the biggest or smallest values?
• What’s happening nearby? On your beat?
• How do things compare by category? Subcategory?
• What’s missing? Where are the gaps?

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