Ecological fallacy

How it is used

Check whether the claim concerns a different level from the evidence.

Example sentences

1. Inferring each pupil's income from school averages risks an ecological fallacy.

   A group average does not describe every member.

2. The reviewer identified an ecological fallacy in our claims about individual voters.

   Aggregate voting data cannot establish each person's behavior.

Common collocations

• avoid an ecological fallacy
• commit an ecological fallacy

Related terms

• analysisDetailed examination of data or a text in order to identify patterns, relationships or meaning, often using statistical or qualitative techniques.
• draw a conclusionTo decide what something means or what is true after thinking carefully about the evidence or results.

More terms: Data and Analysis

• data
• findings
• significant
• correlation
• thematic analysis
• account for
• interpret
• dataset
• mean
• standard deviation
• descriptive statistics
• p-value