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Question: The Richard M. Brodsky Foundation is sponsoring a 5K / AIDS / Cancer / Survive / Run / Walk in Long Island, New York. This is also a very health oriented event as women can get free mammogaphies if they do not have health insurance and there will be free AIDS testing for all people. Can you please tell me what women's age group(s) on Long Island would it be accurate to state that breast cancer is the leading cause of death and if you could cite the reference, it would be greatly appreciated. I tried doing research by using google and I could get the answer. Thank you very much.
Answer: It sounds like your organization's run/walk and whole effort is wonderful. It is not possible for us to find a statistic as specific as this, but we certainly empathize with this goal of yours. Frequently in our work, we have the same image in our mind of the exact statistic that would make our argument so perfect. And oftentimes we just "know" that stat has to be out there, for this particular age group and demographic and this particular region in the world. Once in a while, we can search internet databases or conduct a literature review on university databases and discover a finding that is very, very close. More often than not, we end up settling for findings that give the same general story, and often they work just as effectively. Maybe the statistic ends up being for the whole state rather than the city of interest. But the key method for finding statistics that tell the story you know is out there, is to keep searching. Often times there are large national organizations or institutes for a particular topic that have enormous archives of statistics. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are a good place to start. You may just find that study that was conducted in New York and that breaks the statistics down giving you the figures for Long Island. There are also many foundations that fund research projects and put out reports. You could also check newspaper archives. Whenever we engage in one of these searches, we end up building our knowledge base and find five sets of key statistics, none of them perfect, but together they get across the exact point we're trying to make--the one that most convincingly gets across the truth.
Question Date: Wed, 03/26/2008