John - thanks for the much-needed schooling! I'm clearly in no position to argue with your infinitely superior knowledge of statistical theory, and I fully accept your basic point.
Nonetheless... The point I was trying to make in my last response (and I appreciate this wasn't clear from the original piece - for which
mea culpa, errare humanum est, and so on) was
not that the figures were interesting in terms of what they said about the gap between men and women. It's more the fact that the score for women was so high.
So as long as you're happy that the sample is statistically significant (as e.g. David seemed to be), presumably the hope would be that if you ran the survey a thousand times, you'd get more or less the same score for women, and more or less the same score for men. And these scores would be more or less the same as each other.
I appreciate that none of this proves that women are more resilient than men. But surely it does at least suggest that there isn't perceived to be much of a gap between them? And personally, I find even this surprising. Instinctively - and you may disagree with this - I'd have expected the scores for men to be much higher (though I'm not entirely sure why). So I still think there's an interesting point in there.
One more thing - on a wider point, I hope you'll agree that it's rather unfair to suggest that we make a habit of 'parroting propaganda'. We'll often question the motivation and methodology of research that other outlets run unquestioningly (
as per this).
