Thursday, July 8, 2010

For Your Viewing Pleasure...

I FINALLY finished all the research and rocket science calculations and designing of graphs for my poster presentation at the National Diversity in Libraries Conference to be held at Princeton next week. I really had no idea how much time and work that was required to put something like that together. I had such an enormous amount of data to sift through, with 1020 participants, that I've been dreaming about compounded interest formulas. (I wanted to reflect student loan debt in 2010 dollars.) Now that all that work is done, I'm so excited!! People asked if I'd be sharing some of this, and I thought, why not give a sneak peek? So here's one horribly scandalous graph to get your attention:
The truth of the matter is that it's really only slightly scandalous.  This is how you scare your friends and family with statistics - Turn it into a graph!  Let me explain, since non-minority librarians make up 89% of the library population, (despite making up 75% of the U.S. population), it makes sense that there would be a high percentage of non-minorities that account for a great deal of scholarships and awards.  HOWEVER, one of the things I say in my research, is that the percentage of scholarships should at least directly reflect the population.  So, if minorities make up 11% of the library population, shouldn't they be getting at least 11% of the scholarships??  My survey results say minorities are only getting 8%.  I have some ideas as to why, and even a lot of data to back it up.  I will be revealing all at NDLC next week with even more terrifying charts and graphs!  They're so spooky it should be Halloween.

1 comment:

  1. That is an interesting find! Have a good poster session. Mine is in October on an entirely different kind of research this time.

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