Statistics

The word statistics comes from a German word statistik which was first used in the 18th century. This word came from the word state (an area of land that a government or monarchy governs). It is useful, necessary, for the government to have information about the state in order to help with good policy making decisions. This information about the state was the original meaning of statistics.

Data is information collected for reasoning, discussion, or calculation. A census gathers data on the people living in a country or region. How many there are, their ages, sexes, occupations. One of the earliest censuses is the census of the United States which is conducted every 10 years and started in 1790.

Information about the state was gathered earlier than this though. For example, after the Normans (from Normandy in northern France) conquered England in the 11th century, King William commissioned a survey of a large part of England and Wales. He wanted to know how many people there were and what land and buildings they owned and how many sheep and cows they possessed. This information was collected so that the Normans could collect taxes.

From the 19th century, the word statistics meant the collection, summary and analysis of any data, not just data collected by the state.

Florence Nightingale contributed enormously to the development of Statistics. She was in charge of nursing in the Crimean war (1853 to 1856).

She collected and analysed large amounts of data about the war and discovered that 16,000 of the 18,000 deaths in the army were not due to battle wounds but to preventable diseases, spread by the dirty conditions that soldiers lived in.

She represented the death toll in an easy to understand diagram below.

Florence’s work showing that most of the deaths were due to preventable diseases lead to army medical, sanitary science and statistics departments being established to improve healthcare.

People gather data on sporting events, to monitor their own fitness, for their own financial decisions. Data are used to analyse the weather and climate, to describe the economic situation in a country and to monitor and predict the occurrence of disease among many other uses.

We can know the past and current state of something because of statistics and we are also able to have a go at predicting the future with statistics.