Here's a warning to sloppy reporters, deceptive politicians and biased researchers: Joel Best has your number.

Best, professor and chairperson of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, has written a new book examining the use and misuse of statistics. He says statistics play an important role in shaping the nation's thinking about key social issues, but all too often those numbers are dead wrong.

Frequently, Best writes in Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians and Activists, published by the University of California Press, statistical information is misrepresented by people and organizations interested in shaping the national policy debate to their own ends.

In his introduction to the book, Best says his interest in the manipulation of statistics was spurred by a graduate student's dissertation prospectus, which attempted to grab attention by quoting a statistic claiming: "Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled."

Best decided to look carefully at the figure, which was published in a journal in 1995. He did the math and found that if only one child had been killed by gunfire in 1950, an annual doubling would have brought the figure to 32,768 by 1965, to 1 million in 1970, to 1 billion in 1980 and to more than 35 trillion by the date the journal was published.

Investigating further, he found the basis of the claim--a 1994 report by the Children's Defense Fund, which found that the number of American children killed each year by guns had doubled since 1950, not doubled each year since 1950.

To Best, the lesson is clear. "Bad statistics live on," he says. "They take on lives of their own."

Damned Lies and Statistics is designed to help readers think critically about social statistics presented as fact, and Best centers his work on a wide assortment of contemporary issues, including abortion, cyberporn, homelessness, teen suicide and the U.S. census.

In the book, Best outlines how and why flawed statistics emerge, spread and reach the public consciousness in debates over public policy. He also offers advice on how to detect statistics that have been misrepresented and how to make sense out of the "stat wars" that break out among experts.

The book, which was featured in the May 4 Chronicle of Higher Education Review, has received widespread critical acclaim.

"Joel Best is at it again," Patricia Adler, author of Peer Power, writes. "In Damned Lies and Statistics, he shows how statistics are manipulated, mismanaged, misrepresented and massaged by officials and other powerful groups to promote their agendas. He is a master at examining taken-for-granted 'facts' and debunking them through careful sociological scrutiny."

--Neil Thomas, AS '76