Statistics Surprises
ambience: water well in Africa
Statistics help researchers, governments and other organizations arrive at informed decisions. Along the way, there are often surprises. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Vance: These are sounds of people collecting water from a hand pump. We can hear that it’s a real hive of activity because the water sources are a central meeting point for community members.
Eric Vance is statistician and an Associate Research Professor in the College of Science at Virginia Tech. He and his team conducted a study in Mozambique, trying to determine the impact of the use of hand pumps at village wells.
Vance: So in a community that receives a hand pump, there are families that use the hand pump and also families that don’t use the hand pump. One of our areas of research is figuring out what are the factors that will cause a family to accept that technology or not. And the main factor is just distance to the hand pump. The closer it is, the more likely they are to use it. But another factor and this was a surprising finding is that some of the women don’t like using the hand pump because that means that they have to stay within their community because that’s where the hand pump is.
But an hour away they get to meet with women from other villages that share that water source. They’re out of their home. They’re out of the village. It’s their own free time and free space, and they miss that by using the water source that’s really close to home.
If you understand some of these other issues, that can help you in designing the next generation of hand pump or in locating the hand pumps differently, which would allow for more of that social interaction.
We’ll hear more about statistics in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.