Sharon Lohr researches and writes about statistics: where they come from, how to interpret them, and how to tell the good statistics from the bad. After receiving her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sharon taught for 25 years at the University of Minnesota and Arizona State University, where she was Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Statistics. As a Vice President at Westat, she developed survey designs and statistical analysis methods for use in transportation, public health, crime measurement, and education. She now does freelance statistical consulting and writing. See the feature article about Sharon in the September 2018 issue of Amstat News.
Episode Description
Of all places to look for statistics, who’d have thought a settlement house would be a place that you would find insight into data of their communities. However, that’s the focus of this episode of Stats+Short Stories with guest Sharon Lohr.
+Full Transcript
John Bailer: In this episode of Stats and Short Stories we’re going to take a time machine back to the late 1800s and find out that Chicago was hopping. Not just in terms of nightlife and other things, but in terms of statistics. And of all places to look for statistics, who’d have thought a settlement house would be a place that you would find insight into data of their communities. Today Sharon Lohr is joining us to talk about this place and the special people that were part of this place. So, Sharon, welcome and glad you could join us.
Sharon Lohr: Thank you for having me.
Bailer: Sharon, could you give us some idea of what is a settlement house and what attracted these people to work there? And- I’ll stop there.
Lohr: Okay, a settlement house was a residence in, generally, a working-class area of the city. And in Chicago, Hull-House was probably the best known of these and the site still stands. It’s on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago and it’s a museum there.
Bailer: Oh cool.
Lohr: And so, what happened is men and women would reside there and they would work with the communities in the neighborhood. And so, at Hull-House they had educational programs, they’d have lectures, they’d have daycare you know, you name it. They had all kinds of social services for the community. And they also attracted residents from all over.
Bailer: So, two of the residents that you highlight in some of your writing include Florence Kelly and Agnes Sinclair Holbrook. So, what was special about these two individuals? And what drew them to Hull-House? And what did they do when they were there?
Lohr: Well, Florence Kelly was an amazing woman and she was active in all kinds of movements at the time. But I think a big attraction of all of the settlement houses is that they were a way for educated women to use their education at the time, right? So, there was communal dining; they didn’t have to prepare food. There was you know important work to be done that they could you know feel they were of service to the community and I don’t know exactly what attracted these two particular women there but I do know that Florence Kelly ended up at Hull-House after escaping, basically, an abusive marriage in New York City. And so, she fled to Chicago and she went into residence at Hull-House right after that. Agnes Sinclair Holbrook went to Chicago after graduating from Wellesley College and she was attracted by, I believe she was taking courses at the University of Chicago at the time, and you know, other than that she did not leave that many papers explaining her motivation in there, but she did write an article later where you know, she talked about just all of the activities they did at Hull-House. You know she said teaching, conducting clubs, visiting, entertaining, managing picnics and country parties, connecting the diseased and needy with hospitals and charitable institutions, advising the perplexed and distressed on points of law, finding employment. I mean, so she was doing all these sorts of activities during the day.
Richard Campbell: Who supported these settlement houses? Who organized them? Who supported them? How did they get started?
Lohr: Well, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr had supported Hull-House and residents paid their own board to be there. And there were various donors who would support different programs at the settlement houses.
Rosemary Pennington: Visualization is such a big interest area for journalists as well as statisticians, and on your site, on your blog, you write about these maps that were produced about Hull-House or of the Hull-House area. Could you talk a little bit about why these maps are so interesting? And maybe about what we, as people who are thinking about how to visualize data usefully could learn from looking at and studying these maps?
Lohr: Well, we’re now in the 125th anniversary of these maps. They came out in 1895. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write about them this year. And they are one of the earliest examples of just color-coding the entire neighborhood so that you can see. Now the data for this particular mapping, these were not collected by the Hull-House residents, they were collected by the U.S. Department of Labor. And Carol Wright who was then the Commissioner of Labor published this long long long volume of tables from the data. But you learn more from one of these graphs than you can learn from any of the tables because what they did is they displayed, well here are the different levels of wages earned by families in particular locations, and here are the nativity data for those same individuals in the data and so you can correlate those, you can see the patterns, you can see the clusters in the data.
Pennington: Yeah. I mean they’re really compelling.
Bailer: Yeah they are, very much so. And there’s also this tie to some of the sweatshop conditions and poverty components. And you know, you’re talking about the 125th anniversary of the publishing of this, it’s also the 50th anniversary of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. So, in terms of, so there was this- was very very early occupational health information and data, but then there was also pandemic related information that they were investigating like smallpox that they were seeing surface in some of these factories. So, I found myself thinking oh my goodness, you know, take that time machine 125 years and you’re reading a lot of headlines and working on the same kind of problems that we’re encountering today. And you know, I don’t think I’ve seen anybody talk about contact tracing as Stovall sampling, but I think that’s kind of neat. So, can you talk a little bit about the occupational research motivation for some of these women and also some of the impacts on things that we’re learning as we’re dealing with a pandemic now and how they addressed it then.
Lohr: Well, Florence Kelly was actually the state factory inspector at the time, and this was a landmark. She was the first woman to hold the statewide office in Illinois.
Pennington: Wow.
Lohr: And so, she threw out her career you know? She fought for occupational safety, she fought for child labor laws, she also fought for women’s suffrage which we also have an anniversary of this year. And, for all of these women, there was this big connection between gathering statistics and the fight for women’s suffrage because they knew they had to have good data to counteract the arguments of the time. And it was something that you know they were not just fighting for, they had to persuade men to vote for suffrage. So, it wasn’t just convincing other women, it was convincing the men to finally pass that amendment in suffrage. And so, all of these things were interconnected because we’re seeing the same kinds of patterns right now in making sure that everyone can vote. And they had that battle as well in the 1890s and through the 19-teens.
Pennington: One of the interesting things I’ve found is that, so Florence Kelly and Agnes Sinclair Holbrook both are living in the settlement house, in Hull House, but they also contributed to the collection of data to help people understand- to help create these visualizations, and I think it’s sort of interesting this idea of being in the space and understanding the space as you’re collecting the data so that you can maybe perhaps better contextualize the data that you’re finding, and I just find that is really sort of interesting point to to all of this, that these people were living and breathing this as they were collecting this data.
Lohr: That is such an excellent point and they knew the neighborhood that they were creating the maps about and that they were writing about. And Florence Kelly had done a previous data collection for the state of Illinois and she had also done this investigation for the smallpox epidemic that was taking place at about the same time. And you know 1893, when all of this data collection was going on that, was a year kind of like 2020 because they had the smallpox epidemic going on in Chicago, they had the panic of 1893, they had the depression, it was not a good year for people in Chicago and they were collecting data about it at the time and they were writing about the conditions based on statistics. And I think a big lesson from that was just how crucial having good statistics is when you are in a time of crisis, and that’s what Florence Kelley wrote about with the smallpox outbreak. You know she said we have to have good data about this, and we need to know where the Board of Health needs to vaccinate people and how to control this epidemic.
Bailer: I’m afraid we’re going to have to bring it to a close, but I can’t imagine a better place to stop. So, thank you, Sharon, that was great. This is all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Short Stories and again Sharon, thank you for being here. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple Podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on our program send your emails to Statsandstories@miamioh.edu and check out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future episodes of Statistics- Stop that, I’ll do it again. And be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.