How much do you know about Canada’s population? British Columbia’s? Does it matter?
A recent survey by the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London suggests that the British population is “wrong about nearly everything,” according to the headline of Jonathan Paige’s article on July 9 for The Independent.
Happily, the article’s title contains a wee bit of exaggeration; it is, after all, pretty hard to be wrong about everything.
Unhappily, the survey shows that there are a lot of things the British population doesn’t know about the British population.
For example, common opinion holds that 31 per cent of Britain’s population are recent immigrants; the actual figure is less than half that. Similarly, 30 per cent of the population is thought to be of black or Asian ethnicity; the actual number is closer to 11 per cent.
Both violent and non-violent crime rates are falling, but over half the people polled believe it’s rising. Public opinion also estimates that benefit fraud occurs at a rate of 24 per cent, when it actually rests at 0.7 per cent, and that teen pregnancy rates are 25 times higher than they actually are.
These types of misconceptions about key social issues are telling; the fact that this survey indicates anxiety about crime, immigration and ethnic diversity is important as well.
One explanation for these wildly inaccurate “common knowledge-isms” is that they’re a reaction to what’s on the news. In a national conversation that is beginning to include topics such as gay rights and immigration, the increased amount of air time spent on these topics is unconsciously taken as an indication that there are a lot more immigrants and LGBQT people in the population than there are.
This is especially true for people of older generations, who can remember a time when these issues weren’t discussed at all; now that minority groups are visibly present in an unprecedented way, the uptick in conversation about these issues is mistakenly perceived as proof of a percentage increase.
This survey makes me wonder how well we know our own population and our own statistics.
According to Statistics Canada’s 2011 figures, 20.6 per cent of Canada’s population of 35 million is foreign-born (the highest percentage of foreign-born citizens of the G8 countries), but only 3.5 per cent of us are recent immigrants, and only 19 per cent of us belong to a visible minority (roughly 25 per cent in B.C., according to B.C. Statistics). Two-thirds of Canadians are Christian, 3.2 per cent of us are Muslim, and 23.9 per cent of us have no religious affiliation. Teen pregnancy is hovering around 2.8 per cent, but varies by province.
In B.C., roughly two per cent of us use some form of income assistance, 62 per cent have post-secondary education, 24 per cent hold a university degree and 28 per cent of 18-year-olds do not graduate high school.
This stuff sounds dry, but a solid understanding of our essentials is, well, essential if we want our opinions on social issues to be grounded in fact. As Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, says, “How can you develop good policy when public perceptions … [are] out of kilter with the evidence?”
It’s not so surprising: A well-read, well-educated person might check the news every day, but won’t necessarily be keeping up with the national statistics. But stats are important, and in this era of shock journalism, where narratives are spun to sensationalize or obscure the truth as often as to reveal it, if we don’t know our facts, we’re in trouble.
Most importantly, if we don’t know what our cold, hard facts are, our anxieties and beliefs can lead us to create a world that doesn’t exist.
For example, in the United States, 0.6 per cent of households are same-sex households. For rough comparison, 0.8 per cent of all couples in Canada are same-sex; Australia, 0.7 per cent; and Britain, 0.4 per cent.
These numbers are low, but people living in regions with more intolerance for same-sex relationships consistently overestimate the number of same-sex couples in the population. Anxiety over the increased visibility of the LGBQT population after decades of silence results in an overestimation of the size of that population. We see the same phenomenon in place when it comes to attitudes toward, for example, immigration and crime.
This survey should remind us how important media literacy is, whether we’re British or British Columbian.
