The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) has attempted to rank its member countries (34, plus Brazil and Russia)
in consideration to other categories (11 topics) outside of “cold numbers of
GDP and economic statistics” that contribute to overall well-being of a
countries’ inhabitants (OECD, n.d. a).
The World Happiness Report similarly does this too, but for a more wide range
of countries, with more attention paid to subjective happiness as a criteria
for government policy (World Happiness Report, n.d.). Since I come from a
background in Sociology, these particular reports were often brought up and
discussed. Those are also the only more visualized statistics (in particular,
of Canada’s wellbeing, OECD, n.d. b) I can recall going through in detail,
leaving an imprint on me. The numbers provided by OECD at the time did not
surprise me as it reinforced some of the things I had some sort of
preconception of, particularly of Canada and/or the other countries I skimmed
through. As for what I learned, both organizations exemplified (and even explicitly
admitted/are aware, which is good practice as researchers) some of the
limitations of their statistics which include, but are not limited to, access to
data let alone comparable data. As
for other related concerns I had (that can be classified as concerns over the
public presentation of statistics and all studies in general), was that some
viewers are misled through the relative decontextualization of the visual data available
on websites, and the potential lack
of initiative, knowledge and/or skill required to check out the longer version with
more accompanying detailed explanations. For example, the website’s design
(e.g. fonts, embedded links etc.) can limit knowing how to initiate a search on
OECD’s database located in another webpage with a different URL and locate
details usually found compiled into PDF format (see OECD, 2016). Understandably,
given the breadth and depth of the data and its availability and accessibility
in real/virtual formats, as well as the various demographics of potential
viewers, it can be hard to mitigate such concerns.
Lilian Le-Dang
References
OECD. (2016). OECD Data.
Retrieved February 26, 2016, from https://data.oecd.org/
OECD. (n.d. a). OECD Better Life
Index. Retrieved February 26, 2016, from
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111
OECD. (n.d. b). OECD Better
Life Index. Retrieved February 26, 2016, from
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/canada/
World Happiness Report.
(n.d.). Home – World Happiness Report. Retrieved February 26, 2016,
from http://worldhappiness.report/
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