The article “Best Cold Press Juicers of 2022” by Lisa Weinberger is a promotional overview of the items on the cold press juicer market. It is not rare to find a news piece which advocates for a particular product. It is even less frequent for such news items to compare products with their competitors. The reason why Weinberger’s article is noteworthy lies in its use of statistical tools and z-scores in particular to explain how specific products are compared and analyzed.
The article depicts the analysis process from the point of the choice of companies. Specifically, author “compared the available juicers from the top juicer companies across several criteria, including cost, juicer type, juice jug capacity, overall dimensions, motor power, warranty, and whether or not they were cold press juicers” (Weinberger, 2022, para. 10). Then, the team conducted an analysis of available professional ratings and reviews.
Each rating was converted into a common of 0 to 5 scale. Subsequently, the team used “a standard deviation (or Z-Score) calculation to determine how each company’s score compared to the source’s mean score” (Weinberger, 2022, para. 15). Essentially, the team attempted to measure Central Tendency, which is “the point at which the distribution is in balance” (Foster et al., 2018, p. 75). The author explains what is meant by Z-score, which is “a data point’s relation to the mean measurement of the data set” (Weinberger, 2022, para. 16). The Z-score was calculated by subtracting the mean of the ratings from the company’s rating and dividing it by the standard deviation.
As a result, the team managed to organize an unbiased methodology because it was based on the reviews of different parties. As z-score “gives information about the relative location of that score within its distribution”, the team understood how much each cold press juicer deviated from the mean (Foster et al., 2018, p. 96). As such, the use of standard scores allowed the team to objectively analyze the market of cold press juicers.
References
Foster, G. C., Lane, D., Scott, D., Hebl, M., Guerra, R., Osherson, D., & Zimmer, H. (2018). An introduction to psychological statistics. University of Missouri – St Louis
Weinberger, L. Best cold press juicers of 2022. U.S. News & World Report. Web.