Statistical Sins: Thanksgiving Edition

Hopefully you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I ended up traveling yesterday, and that combined with some illnesses in my family means I still haven't gotten the "official" Thanksgiving meal (turkey, sweet potatoes, etc.). That should happen tomorrow.

On the subject of Thanksgiving, FiveThirtyEight recently re-released that results of a survey from a couple years ago, showing the most disproportionately consumed Thanksgiving side dish:

Here’s the most disproportionately consumed Thanksgiving side dish in each region: https://t.co/WDpqVXnoSY pic.twitter.com/j8GuNSxmjx

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) November 22, 2017

And yes, I can say Kansans love their casseroles, especially green bean casserole. I've been to family Thanksgivings where there have been, I kid you not, 3 different versions of green bean casserole.

But what people are really reacting to is that the West coast just loves their salad:

I don't say this sentence often or lightly, so it should be savored by those of you inclined:

The rest of us could learn something from the South https://t.co/31FY6cF72Q

— Doug (@moonwalkmcfly) November 22, 2017

But some savvy Tweeters are suggesting that this could be an issue with the survey itself or analysis of the resulting data:

So I’m guessing that the pollsters got a range of answers about various types of cold side dish, and egregiously lumped them all together in the category of “salad,” leading to all of your justifiable anger.

— Emily Dagger (@AbbottRabbit) November 22, 2017

Want to try to answer this question yourself? FiveThirtyEight was kind enough to share the data on GitHub. Once I get some writing done, I might have to dig into this dataset.