I wonder how they know that – and what it means? A snippet on Breast Cancer Awareness Month

From Breakthrough Breast Cancer “We do what we say” Annual Report and Accounts 2008-2009 Page 15 (the most recent report)

 

Ah yes. Numbers. The theme of this week. See yesterday’s entry if you are already fed up with this one and want to leave.

 

I wonder a) what they mean here and b) how they know? Extrapolation undoubtedly, but I wonder what from?

 

Breakthrough supports excellent scientists. That’s their main USP (Unique Selling Point). A pity the conventions of science publication don’t extend to their public communications. Scientific publication  mean you describe your working out to aid reproducibility (as I’m doing in this post, as it happens) so others can retrace all the steps.

 

I’ll assume the 55% of adult women is a UK figure, in the absence of information on any possible breakdown of the four nations. If you assume differently you can arrange your populations and sums to suit.

 

Through the wonders of the Interactive Population Pyramid of the National Statistics Office (a serendipitous discovery I made some years back. I can only find it because I know it’s there and what it’s called, not because it was an obvious ‘go to’ destination on the site) I can see there were about 23,933,200 women aged 18 and above in the UK in 2008.

 

At 55% Breakthrough is claiming to have ‘reached’ 13,163,260 of them through the October 2008 BCAM. 13 million. That’s a lot. Huge reach for a charity. It feels large enough to seem ummm….unlikely.  If I’m wrong, which would be good, it’s still not evidence of huge success in breast cancer awareness raising. You surely have to specify the quality of awareness raised. Until it means the Touch Look Check – TLC information became knowledge and was retained, reaching 13 million women is an impressive but possibly quite empty claim for successful breast cancer awareness raising.

 

On reflection, if the 55% figure did equate to ‘13 million adult women’ the writers would produce text with that plain, powerful statement. It’s much more impressive than “55% of women aged 18 and over”. So maybe it’s 55% of some other women.