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Depending on the source, it is estimated that 1 ~ 2% of the U.S. Population are active SCUBA divers.
Also dependent on the source, it is estimated that 1 ~ 2% of active divers are active cave divers.
Does anyone have a good estimate as to what percentage of active cave divers are women?
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I have a little problem with those estimates. The current US population is over 300 million. that would make the number of OW divers over 3 million, and the number of cave divers over 30 thousand. My guess is the total number of cave divers in more like 3 thousand, and only about a third are active.Quote:
Originally Posted by Minijunkie
As for the percentage of women, certainly less than 50%, and probably more like 20%.
74.3% of statistics are made up on the spot.
I agree with Forrest; there's no way those "estimates" are anywhere close.
Internet quotations should not be trusted.
-Abraham Lincoln
50% of cave divers (that live at my house) are women.
Mike
:rollguyQuote:
Originally Posted by gschaut
Quote InvalidQuote:
Originally Posted by gschaut
386% of the cave divers at my house are women.Quote:
Originally Posted by MORGAN
Hmmm - does that mean that there are 3.86 Shirleys, or that there are some Shirleys, or fractions of Shirleys, that aren't cave divers? Or is my OCD just especially bad this evening?Quote:
Originally Posted by sskasser
Mike
Maybe we could add this to the census? Lord knows they waste enough other money.
Nearly twenty years ago, conventional wisdom was that 3.5 million Americans were active sport divers, defined then as divers making at least three dives year, which isn’t much activity. That figure came from an estimate by one individual, John McAniff, the sole employee of the National Underwater Diving Accident Data Center (NUDADC) at the University of Rhode Island, which soon afterwards got scooped up by the Divers Alert Network (DAN). However, Robert Monaghan, a NAUI and PADI instructor with doctoral training Today, in the 21st century, you’d expect the industry to have a better handle on things, right? Well, not so fast, Buck Rogers. Numbers are still hard to find and certify because dive organizations are tight-lipped about their data, refusing to share it with the public and even with each other. “The industry is under-reported,” says Mark Young, publisher of Dive Center Business. “We don’t know much about ourselves.” Renee Duncan of DAN told us, “There’s really no true number for certified divers because this is not a regulated industry, so it will always be a squishy figure. We’ve quoted the 1 to 3 million number on our diving fatality reports.”
Dive organizations are tight-lipped,
refusing to share their data with the
public and even with each other
Until this spring, PADI’s website addressed the question “How Many Active Divers Are There in the US?” by noting that it is one of the most frequently asked questions PADI America receives. The most recent estimates posted (for the calendar year 2000) ranged from 1.6 to 2.9 million, but they were recently taken off the site (PADI did not respond to multiple phone calls we made to discuss these numbers). Nor does NAUI, SDI/TDI or SSI list figures on their web sites.
in statistical modeling, argued in a series of Undercurrent articles that the active diver population was actually closer to 700,000. Subsequently, McAniff told Undercurrent that the 3.5 million number was “purely my guesstimates and have been arrived at without any insider information, and may well be inaccurate.”
So How Many Divers Are There?
If you define active as taking five or more dives a year, which seems reasonable, we think 1.2 million, plus or minus 15 percent, might hit it pretty close. And we will be pleased to publish any data to the contrary.... http://www.undercurrent.org/UCnow/di...ers200705.html
There are a couple of non-divers, and one non-swimmer :)Quote:
Originally Posted by MORGAN
"Figures don't lie, but liars do figure."
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
Sam Clemens
He also said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." He attributed it to British PM Benjamin Disraeli, but historians say he never said it.
I would agree that the number may be somewhere between "squishy" and un-obtainable. Most of my co-workers in my department have some form of scuba C-card. Only one of us is an active diver. The bulk of my co-workers got certified during some sort of vacation activity or as a humanities course during college. None.... Not one has been in the water more than a handfull of times. I would guess there is somewhere around or maybe over a ten to one ratio of certified divers to active divers. Unless the certifying agencies contacts those divers with the threat of loosing their C-cards unless they can prove currency there will never be a way to count "active" divers. The agencies or at least the ones still in business may be able to report how many divers they have ever certified but how many are active, alive, sitting out for a few years, or out of the activity all together???..... kinda like how many licks it takes to get to the center of the tootsie roll tootsie pop.... the world may never know.
I was at Little River yesterday afternoon and almost all the divers there were women.
The article is almost 7 years old, and I don't see a whole lot of really good data in it. In fact, I don't see how there can be any good data on active divers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Omisson
First of all, how can the agencies have any idea? Let's look at me. How would any of them know if I did any diving this year? Next, if they somehow knew I was diving actively, what agency would claim me? I have certifications from PADI, UTD, NSS-CDS, TDI, and PSAI. Under which agency was I diving when I dived? Finally, let's say they made some kind of a huge effort to find out--how much money would they have to spend for this purpose, and why would they feel they needed to spend that much money? I don't think the agencies are being tight-lipped as much as they can't possibly have any idea.
The agencies can tell you how many total certifications they issue. PADI has been claiming roughly 900,000 total certifications at all levels worldwide for about a decade. So what does that tell us? Colorado, where I live, has among the most certifications per capita of all the states in the U.S., but only a tiny percentage dive in our local shallow, muddy reservoirs. Most get certified in anticipation of a coming trip to a tropical resort, a trip that might not be repeated for a couple of years, at which point they might give it another go. Or maybe they won't. How will the agency know what any diver does after certification?
So if the agencies can't do it, who can? Do we want dive operators and dive shops around the world to maintain a massive database tracking the habits of every diver who dives with them, rents tanks, etc.? Why would such a massive effort be necessary? Would anyone really want that to happen?
What can be tracked, though, is overall industry statistics. How much equipment is being sold? How many dive shops are opening or closing? That won't tell you how many divers there are, but it can give you a sense of the health of the activity.
The training agencies would be in the best position to get the information, but I can't imagine they'd want to publish how few divers are active. I'd be like a LDS announcing that most of the gear they sell hardly ever gets used.
The guy who taught my basic OW class in 2001 told me that only 5% of people who become scuba certified are still diving five years later. I have no idea how accurate this is.
Mike
How would they know?Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenwood_60
Sampling.Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnAd
Who would they sample? How? PADI has in the past sent out surveys to new students via mail, getting far less than a 10% return. They are switching to email in the hope of increasing it to 15%. How much money would such a survey cost, and what would be their incentive to pay that money. How would they be able to get in touch with people who certified 40 years ago and are still diving but have moved 5 times without telling them?Quote:
Originally Posted by Greenwood_60
This Wikipedia article lists well over 150 diver certification agencies around the world, and I know one that isn't on the list. Suppose they all did this. Who would put all that information together?
And suppose that actually happened. Suppose PADI, UTD, TDI, NSS-CDS, and PSAI all got in touch with me and asked me if I were still diving. Would I then be reported as one active diver or five active divers?
I think you're missing my point. They could take a random sample of their certified divers and get a reasonable representation of what percentage of certified divers continue to dive and for how long. They may already have. My point is, you and I will never see their numbers.
Divers are what is known in epidemiology as a "discrete" population, in that we aren't registered anywhere. The difficulty we face in determining a denominator is similar in researching the homeless, illicit drug users, same-sex relationships, basically any unregistered condition relating to health. If we had diver numbers, and/or dive numbers, then we could identify such things as the correct insurance premiums to charge, which sub-groups might be over-represented in injuries or deaths and ripe for safety interventions, and other practical things. But, we don't. There have been some good attempts. Warrick McDonald in Victoria, Australia surveying number of air-fills for a good while, telephoning all the dive centres in the state. Something similar was done in Canada and linked to mortality. At the US base on Okinawa they counted air-fills and injuries and deaths to determine morbidity and mortality per dive. DAN (USA) examined their insured member numbers and claims made.
I gave it a good go in Western Australia, trying multiple methods to build up a picture that could be used to "guestimate" approximate figures. These figures I hoped would give me Bayesian estimates to start with, before then using other sampling methods to test their robustness.
The methods I used were:
Firstly, I counted every dive centre advertisement in every telephone directory for Western Australia, since the first in 1969, (which had one ad). Growth was steady till 2000 and then it levelled off. Here is the reference: Buzzacott P. Western Australian dive industry growth and survival, 1969-2005. Journal of Ecotourism, 2008; 7: 221-229.
Next I did a survey of 500 dive centre customers including previous students and walk-in customers. From this I estimated how active the still active were and what the level of activity was by how many years since trained. That was published here: Buzzacott P, Pikora T, Rosenberg M. Post-training dive inactivity in Western Australia. Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine. 2008; 38: 137-139.
In doing my literature review for that study in 2004 I gathered a collection of data to give me some estimates of the possible scale of participation that I should expect in West Australia, which can be downloaded here: http://archive.rubicon-foundation.or...pdf?sequence=1
My next study saw me hanging around dive sites and crewing on liveaboard trips, surveying active divers about their experience, years of training, etc etc. One of the papers describing those results can be downloaded here: http://archive.rubicon-foundation.or...pdf?sequence=1
So, now we have an idea of how many dives happen each year in WA, how many the typical diver does, a ball-park idea how many divers actively dive each year and, out of them, how many will take next year off and how many will return to the sport after not diving this year. I also updated the telephone directory listings three years ago to see if the size of the industry appeared to have changed. We still don't have a census but we do have a better idea about the situation than we did when I started this full-time yen years ago.
The next step in the plan was to try alternative sampling methods to strengthen the level of evidence, by having multiple sources pointing towards the same figures. Snowball sampling is now easier than ever, thanks to social networking, but the one method I haven't managed to try yet is capture-recapture, like tagging fish. Basically, I could sample a large database, (let's hypothetically say Driver's licences), and pull out five identifiable items per person, like date of birth, address, maybe names, marital status or whatever, doesn't matter. Then we go somewhere else like surveying divers showing up for dives or members of dive clubs or anywhere totally unrelated to driver's licences but related to diving, and ask those exact same five questions, and from the percentage that are "recaptured" it is possible to estimate how many "divers" are in the wider population (in this simple example, the wider population who have driver's licences and who are in dive clubs).
So, if there are about 3000 cave divers in the US... and 10% or so are women. Then, my girlfriend IS one in a million, just like I tell her.
Are all these "cave divers" certified? Seems to be a lot of uncertified ones lately. However, give it s month or tow and their numbers will be far lower! Just saying.
I had a chance to talk about this subject with a NSS-CDS instructor trainer this past weekend. He said that the best guesstimates that the NSS-CDS have been able to conjure up after talking with the other training agencies would put the number of cave divers @ approximately 8,000 worldwide.
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