Opinion 85
Keith Morrison
Vice-rector for educational Development of the Inter-university Institute of Macau
kmorrison@iium.edu.mo
A question of quality
Q
uesTIon: 1 + 1 = ? answer: from the mathematician: 2;
QuaLITy of LIfe InDex In MaCau (2)
from the management consultant: 3; from the economist:
‘what do you want it to be?’; from the politician: ‘it all depends .
. .’. as Disraeli said, there are ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’.
I am suspicious of statistics from governments. Take the
recent Macau Government report objective Indicator system
of the Quality of Life in Macao (www.ceeds.gov.mo), which
includes several indices of quality of life (QoL) for 1999-2006
in 11 areas.
up go the indices for: education, learning and access
to information; economy; habitation; employment; gender
equality; culture and leisure. Down go: demographic structure;
The first graph seems to show a huge increase in the QoL
natural and built environment; health and medical care; family;
in Macau. The second? no real improvement. In fact the two
and public safety.
graphs contain exactly the same data, it’s just that their vertical
scales differ. so the first looks better. Put technically, this is only
Cover up
because the proportion between the ordinate and the abscissa
has been changed. If you were the government seeking to show
The report is full of photos of smiling families, happy
that Macau’s QoL had improved, which would you present? The
children, a woman nuzzling a baby, father playing on the grass
first graph is almost identical to that in the QoL report.
with children, dragon boat racing, students reading under a
tree, a family cycling, a walk in the woods, a concert. Pictures
Arbitrary
fade into a warm background of nature and sunshine. There
are no pictures of the report’s documented decline in: hospital
Look closer. With the 1999 base year’s index set at 100, the
beds per 1,000 people; proportion of GDP spent on education
overall rise to 2006 was 0.91. but, of course, the figure ‘100’ has
and health; health and safety at work. a woolly cover-up.
no real meaning; it is arbitrary, only for statistical calculation.
The report has no categories for political maturity and
actually how good is the QoL? We don’t know. The report looks
processes, social services and welfare, or over-population. It’s
at the relative rather than absolute QoL. The index only tells us
easy: if you don’t want there to be a problem then you simply
if the supposed QoL has gone up or down, not how good or bad
exclude it from the equation. as the song goes: ‘accentuate the
the QoL is.
positive, eliminate the negative’.
Is a rise of 0.91 large or small? on a scale of, say, 120 points,
Its final graph shows what appears to be a significant rise
it is trivial; in a scale of, say, 10 points it is significant. We don’t
in the overall QoL index for Macau from 1999-2006, from a
know what 0.91 means from this report. Deliberate? Why does
base line of 100 (a commonplace statistical practice) in 1999
the data for this 2008 report stop at 2006? Instantly out of date,
to 100.91 in 2006. but let me present two graphs, using the
before times got hard.
government’s own QoL data.
no technical report is available on, e.g.: sampling and
methodology; data collection; instrumentation; questions asked;
QuaLITy of LIfe InDex In MaCau (1)
calculations; standardisation and bias. There is no way of
checking reliability and validity.
We know nothing about the weightings/proportions of the 48
sub-areas and 11 main areas of QoL focus. We do not know
how each index was calculated for these 11 areas and overall.
The whole report reminds me of the tale of the sandwich
maker who sold costly chicken sandwiches very cheaply. When
asked how he could afford to do this he replied that he included
horse meat in the sandwiches: 50-50: one chicken, one horse.
This report is a piece of populist, positive spin, high on the
‘feel good factor’, from a government that ought to know better.
not much quality there.
february 2009
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