hrefna ,
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

There's a chart going around either from or citing #SafeHomeDotOrg that "ranks" LGBTQ "safety grades" by state.

It's an object lesson in why the assumptions behind your data matter significantly and in how not to communicate data.

First red flag: there are no dates anywhere on it.

Second red flag: A large chunk of its data comes from hate crime reporting rates.

What is a hate crime and how often do things get filed as such matters significantly for these things.

This misleads.

hrefna OP ,
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

There are a slew of reporting biases (and other biases) and an entire set of social constructs around whether something is considered a "hate crime" by state.

You can't just look at the numbers and get a full story and, even if you did, you would need to absolutely under every circumstance report the year the data was collected

Not doing so is data malpractice.

Now maybe SafeHome did exactly that, or maybe this is just some random person's interpretation based on their data. That isn't clear.

hrefna OP ,
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Oh cool, it actually is from their official sources: https://www.safehome.org/data-lgbtq-state-safety-rankings/

This is a very, very poor methodology and it heavily misleads. Their presentation of data in this way is basic data malpractice.

In the flavor text Alaska gets brownie points for considering a bill that would add protections, but that doesn't seem to weigh for sanctuary states.

They used the 2022 FBI's Hate Crime Statistics report uncritically and, uh, no. Bad company, no cookie.

hrefna OP ,
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

See also:

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1145973412/researchers-say-the-fbis-statistics-on-hate-crimes-across-the-country-are-flawed

Researchers cite the gulf between the FBI's hate crime statistics compared to other data sets, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. "There's 200,000 to 300,000 hate crime incidents in a given year and the FBI data records less than 10,000 of them," says Eaven Holder, who authored a peer-reviewed study examining 18 years between the two data sets. "Estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey suggests that 40 to 50% of all hate crimes go unreported to police." In some cases, there is disagreement among law enforcement agencies about what constitutes a hate crime.
ALT
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    • deirdresm ,
    @deirdresm@hachyderm.io avatar

    @hrefna Thank you for this. I’ve been seeing it go around FB.

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