Seeing when relationships breakup
There is a lot of interesting data that is in need of being explained here.
Worried about when you might get dumped? Facebook knows.
That's according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up.
British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled the chart. He showed off the graphic at a TED conference last July in Oxford, England.
In the talk, McCandless said he and a colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases "breakup" and "broken up."
They found two big spikes on the calendar for breakups. The first was after Valentine's Day -- that holiday has a way of defining relationships, for better or worse -- and in the weeks leading up to spring break. Maybe spring fever makes people restless, or maybe college students just don't want to be tied down when they're partying in Cancun. . . .
Mondays seem like an obvious day to put up the information about a breakup.
Labels: relationships, Research
posted by John Lott at 6:44 PM
1 Comments:
A more fundamental problem here is that the underlying data tells us almost nothing about when these people break-up; rather it tells us when they accept that they've finally gone their separate ways and decide to publicize their break-ups, which may have taken place that day, during the preceding week or two, or months earlier.
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