1 in 5 Bloggers are Hispanic

NDN ran two terrific events in the last two days, one on our Hispanic poll, the other on the New Politics Institute's technology work. Cutting edge tech and grassroots Latino politics. Distinct areas, right? Wrong. Becuase you did read the title of this post right. According to yesterday's Pew Blogging Study, 19% of all bloggers are (english speaking) Hispanics. Given how much i know people reading this love it when I try to show off my child-like statistical abilities, i'm only happy to oblige. We have 147 million Americans are online, of whom 8%, or 12 million, blog. 19% of bloggers are hispanics, which comes out as 2.28 million. This is from a total universe of Hispanic internet users of 16m. To put this another way, the ratio of white bloggers to total internet users is 15:1. The ration for hispanics is 7:1, more than twice as many. Even more strikingly, the number of hispanic bloggers is almost double the number of African Americans, despite there being roughly the same numbers of African Americans and Hispanics in the country.

What explains this? It might be an error. The poll sample on the bloggers is small giving a larger than usual error range of +/-7%. But even this means that we can be pretty sure that the true number is between 1.4m and 3.12m. My hunch is that that online hispanics - being a smaller group of the total population of hispanics compared to whites - are disproportionately younger, and wealthier than the group average, factors likely to be associated with having enough money to own a computer and actually know how to use it. Despite the fact the Hispanics are, on average, less wealthy than white Americans, at present those on line must be more blog-friendly on average than white Americans. And youth must have a lot to do with this. Come what may, if these figures are even remotely correct, it means that Hispanics are the most blog rich demographic group in America. I'm going to write to the poll people are see what their hunch is. More anon.

UPDATE - Amanda Lenhart, the author at PEW, writes back in double quick time. Thanks Adanda. Turns out my hunch was not too far off the mark.  More predictably, i goofed on some of the stats, but we'll gloss over that. Lets leave it to the experts:

"As you may have noticed, the sample for this survey is quite small (n=233) which limits the kind of analysis we can do of the data. However, our hunch is that bloggers are more diverse than internet users because they are overwhelmingly young (54% of bloggers are 18-29, compared to 24% of adult internet users), and work by the Census bureau suggests that younger Americans are a more diverse cohort than old Americans – due to birth rates and immigration. (see this USAToday article for a quick overview and a nice chart: http://www.usatoday.com/educate/college/careers/Hot/6-9-05b.htm ) While we can’t analyze our data to show causation, I believe that the age of bloggers at least partly explains the diversity of the group."

 

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