Computers Top BBC List of Stress Producers

twitter writes "The BBC is reporting results of a poll by UK charity Developing Patient Partnerships that shows crashing computers to be one of the most common stresses and that it's actually killing people by driving them to drink and smoke. The quoted list has: 1. IT problems - 30%, 2. Change in financial status/personal injury - 24%, 3. Commuting - 20%. I've seen people take a smoke break when their computer pops a window and they lose an hour or two of work and admins taking their break straight from the bottle."

Comments

I am going to go way out on a limb here

[Anonymous Crowhead]

And guess that the 27% of men and 23% of women who would "light up in such a situation" roughly coorelates to the percentage of smokers in England.

Re:Which is it?

[tktk]

Who are these 21% of people who haven't felt stressed in the last 365 days?

The ones that are high?

Yay for awful conclusions

[Council]

The logic distilled:

When you're stressed, do you smoke or drink? [read: do you smoke or drink? This is an awful question for establishing a link. Possible alternate question: "do you like a massage when you're stressed?"]

What stresses you? Do crashing computers stress you? ["Yeah." Of course they do.]

Therefore, computers drive people to drink.

Nowhere have they established a causal link between the group that is stressed and the group that drinks, aside from what you'd expect from pretty random overlap. This has the smell of a bad study and results blown up to sound outrageous. The article reads like a bunch of observations about overlapping groups concluding with inflammatory statements about two of the groups which are only vaguely linked in the actual data.

Another analogy: IT problems lead to sex. Well, IT problems lead to stress, stressed people are more likely to get massages, and a nontrivial number of massage parlors offer sex services. IT problems lead to prostitution! Please give us more funding.