The goal was to example the data, pose two questions based on one variable, then draw conclusions or comment on the information generated.
Question 1: First, I wanted to know if there was a variation in survival rates among passenger socio-economic classes based on gender categories of female and male.
What I expected to find was that more females than males survived, only because this was historical knowledge of the actual event. What I was quite shocked to find was that there was almost an equal number of females who survived as females who perished in the 3rd class passenger group. Even while almost all of the 1st and 2nd class female passengers survived, I was still expecting a significant casualty rate among 3rd class passengers regardless of gender.
Historically, we also knew that many men did the gentlemanly thing and gave up their positions in the lifeboats for the women and children, but I found it rather odd that the survivability for the 2nd class adult males was so much lower than either the 1st or 3rd class passengers.
Granted we cannot discern from the data provided if the passengers died on board the ship, jumping from the ship, or freezing in the waters while awaiting rescue, and history also indicates that a large number of 3rd class passengers were locked in the lower decks of the ship to keep the limited number of lifeboats from being overrun, but looking at nothing else but the data provided in this study and having no other information for actual comparison, there is some relationship to passenger class and survivability for both genders.
Question 2: I then wanted to know how the ages compared for adults (18 and older) who did or did not survive also based on gender categories of female and male.
I spent quite some time studying this output before I realized why everything seemed so askew. I had to ask myself what I also knew about that period of time in history, ages of men and women when they married, life expectancies, and which groups would travel alone. Women typically married quite young so almost any woman in the adult age groups I was considering would have either been married, widowed or traveling as a nanny or with family. The men, however, married much later in life and many of the men would likely have been younger and traveling to the Americas to seek their fortunes alone.
This helped explain better why the death rates for the females was almost a flat line across the ages. The men they were traveling with would have for the most part done everything in their power to ensure that their women made it onto those lifeboats. This also explains the right-tailed graph for the surviving women, who would have consisted more of young married women. It’s also likely that many of these women had children, who would have also taken up space on the lifeboats.
The men, interestingly enough, had almost the reverse data pattern to the women by age for survivability when just glancing at the charts. Those who perished were weighted heavily in the younger ages up to about 40 years of age and then the data begins trailing off to a right-tail skew. For the adult males who survived there is a bit more peaking in the 20-50 age range when you compare the chart to the female death rates by age, almost enough to move the curve closer to a normal distribution if you removed the few outliers after age 53.
Summarily, I don’t feel that age necessarily had much impact on survivability regardless of gender. It was simply a sign of the times and a statistical fact surrounding the individual passengers who happened to be unlucky travelers on the ship that day.
Question 1: First, I wanted to know if there was a variation in survival rates among passenger socio-economic classes based on gender categories of female and male.
What I expected to find was that more females than males survived, only because this was historical knowledge of the actual event. What I was quite shocked to find was that there was almost an equal number of females who survived as females who perished in the 3rd class passenger group. Even while almost all of the 1st and 2nd class female passengers survived, I was still expecting a significant casualty rate among 3rd class passengers regardless of gender.
Historically, we also knew that many men did the gentlemanly thing and gave up their positions in the lifeboats for the women and children, but I found it rather odd that the survivability for the 2nd class adult males was so much lower than either the 1st or 3rd class passengers.
Granted we cannot discern from the data provided if the passengers died on board the ship, jumping from the ship, or freezing in the waters while awaiting rescue, and history also indicates that a large number of 3rd class passengers were locked in the lower decks of the ship to keep the limited number of lifeboats from being overrun, but looking at nothing else but the data provided in this study and having no other information for actual comparison, there is some relationship to passenger class and survivability for both genders.
Question 2: I then wanted to know how the ages compared for adults (18 and older) who did or did not survive also based on gender categories of female and male.
I spent quite some time studying this output before I realized why everything seemed so askew. I had to ask myself what I also knew about that period of time in history, ages of men and women when they married, life expectancies, and which groups would travel alone. Women typically married quite young so almost any woman in the adult age groups I was considering would have either been married, widowed or traveling as a nanny or with family. The men, however, married much later in life and many of the men would likely have been younger and traveling to the Americas to seek their fortunes alone.
This helped explain better why the death rates for the females was almost a flat line across the ages. The men they were traveling with would have for the most part done everything in their power to ensure that their women made it onto those lifeboats. This also explains the right-tailed graph for the surviving women, who would have consisted more of young married women. It’s also likely that many of these women had children, who would have also taken up space on the lifeboats.
The men, interestingly enough, had almost the reverse data pattern to the women by age for survivability when just glancing at the charts. Those who perished were weighted heavily in the younger ages up to about 40 years of age and then the data begins trailing off to a right-tail skew. For the adult males who survived there is a bit more peaking in the 20-50 age range when you compare the chart to the female death rates by age, almost enough to move the curve closer to a normal distribution if you removed the few outliers after age 53.
Summarily, I don’t feel that age necessarily had much impact on survivability regardless of gender. It was simply a sign of the times and a statistical fact surrounding the individual passengers who happened to be unlucky travelers on the ship that day.
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