The newspaper article studied for this week highlighted recent questions about the relationship between COVID-19 coronavirus infection and the mental well-being of Americans in the LGBTQ+ community. Specifically, the article from Miller showed that during quarantine restrictions, many of the community members between the ages of 13 and 24 were severely stressed (1). This was due to both the need to spend time at home with their relatives — not all of whom accepted the respondent’s identity — and the inability to meet with psychological counselors. In fact, the newspaper article is replete with descriptive statistics and is essentially a summary of an earlier research survey.
More specifically, the text repeatedly uses the percent model to describe specific categories from the number of respondents. For example, more than 80% of the 35,000 thousand LGBTQ+ respondents said their lives had become more stressful under COVID-19. More than 48% indicated an inability to obtain psychological counseling services during this period despite the patient’s wishes. Using percent statistics did not end there, with 40% of respondents saying they had lost their jobs and about 30% having trouble buying food. Finally, about 42% of LGBTQ+ participants specified that they had seriously considered suicide in the past year, with five times the percentage of people discriminated against.
As one can see from the description, the percentages in this paper were used as an ordinarily shocking numbers strategy, since saying that 80% of people in the LGBTQ+ community were stressed during the coronavirus restrictions must be startling. In fact, the article’s descriptive statistics are uninformative but have two main conclusions. Such people could not get support from a professional counselor and often contemplated suicide. However, the article does not provide data for heterosexual individuals, although in their case, the numbers may well have been just as high. However, the article does describe trends in the real American community, and its publication only confirms that the topic of LGBTQ+ minorities is susceptible to the United States (1). I will almost certainly use percentages in my future work as well since these are essential models of descriptive statistics for any study. People tend to trust percentages, and such data are much easier to perceive than saying that 28,000 of the 35,000 participants were stressed. However, in the future, I will try to use percentages more critically and objectively so as not to create a distorted picture of the study.
Reference
Susan Miller. 2021. ‘Crisis Upon Crisis’: COVID-19 Has Put the Mental Health of LGBTQ Young People in Peril, Survey Shows. Web.