This chart is odd if only for showing men outliving women.
The average 15 year old has 3 drinks per week?
edit: ohhh, (I think) - the sample excludes people who donāt drink.
About the age that most of them have teenagers. Sounds right.
ā¦ Iām sorry, in what world are women never ever having more than four drinks?
Cuz that is not my world, at allā¦ O_o
Also, 15 was totally when I started drinking and going to night clubs and all I can think when I look back (or when Iām out and I see underage girls) is what the hell were all those people serving me thinking?
No, 15-year-olds drink an average of four drinks. That is different from what you said.
Iām not going to sealion you here, but that doesnāt seem all that different, except that you rounded up and I rounded down. Never fear, though, if youāre right, Iāll probably come around later when I read up a bit more on how to express this sort of conclusion.
To be picky. This isnāt actually showing ādrinksā, which is a kinda vague term, but Units of Alcohol. A small glass of wine, a half pint of middling beer or lager, a single spirit.
Itās British data, so the ānormalā drink is quite likely to be a pint of beer, which can be 2 or 2.5 units.
What use are confidence intervals? A range would be so much more informative. Wouldnāt you like to know if youāre close to the first percentile, or the tenth?
I had an ex who always joked that I was an old geezer because of my drink preferences (whisk(e)y, grappa, amari, mezcal). Apparently now Iām an old maid, too.
Oh, the four and three was simply a mistake. What I meant was that you are saying that an average 15 year old drinks three drinks a week when what they are saying is that 15 year olds drink an average of three drinks a week. That seems very different to me. Your version causes me to imagine a line of 15 year olds each drinking three drinks while my version allows one to imagine a group of 15 year olds some of whom drink nothing and a few of whom drink a lot. It isnāt the 15 year olds who are averaged but the amount they drink. I am being pedantic, I realize, but the difference is an important, though perhaps ambiguous, difference.
Buckinā the trend!
Good catch!
I thought it was a formatting decision by the Post, but not only is it in the original paper, itās even weirder. The individual plots from each cohort have data for men ending just shy of 100 but for women it goes beyond 100. And then the ladies disappear in the summary plot.
Women, on average, are having around 2-4 drinks per week. This includes me drinking about once a month and also you, apparently, drinking way more. 
The confidence intervals just show that the true mean is most likely somewhere between them.
Iād be curious to see a histogram of this data - were there a few guys super binging and moving the mean up? Mostly people in the middle? Maybe I should actually read the article.
Range would tell you something like participants in the study drank between 0 and 125 drinks a week. You are looking for a percentile.
The confidence intervals show where the population mean most likely is. Since this is a sample study, no one surveyed everyone in the population, so all the study can say with confidence is that the mean was calculated as show and is most likely with in these confidence intervals.
Read the article? What? Wheres the fun in that! Random speculation run wild!
Iām not a huge boozehound, I will say as I got older my drinking decreased, a lot. But Iām still drinking 3-4 drinks a week, now, in my 40s. And it was much much more than that in my 20/30s.
I want to know the demographics of those studied, did they have kids, are they married/divorced, do they own/rent, whats their income, I bet those factors also affect the graph outcome!
If this is Britain/ European data, itās not surprising they show kids drinking. Europe tends to be a lot less hung up about drinking in general; it wouldnāt be too unusual for kids to get something like watered wine with dinner, especially in the Mediterranean countries.
holy shit, my wife is going to be chugging 2 bottles of wine by that point.
side note, do they make a classy drinking bong for wine?
Or 22 year old boyfriends.
Yay! Confidence intervals right there in the graph! How refreshing is that?
