The displayed age groups have fairly similar employment proportions, with no coherent monotone age trend. The printed test reports no evidence against age–employment independence; recomputing from the five visible rows reaches the same qualitative conclusion. Their totals and several auxiliary fields nevertheless do not represent one consistent table.
Each row percentage estimates an employment proportion within that age group. For example, of the youngest displayed group are employed. The employed proportions in the next four rows are , , and . The largest displayed proportion is in the 45–54 group and the smallest in the 55–64 group, a difference of about percentage points. These are conditional percentages, not the age distribution of employed people. The sequence rises and then falls; there is no simple increasing or decreasing pattern.
The null hypothesis for a Pearson chi-squared test of independence is that the joint category probabilities factor into their age and employment marginals. Its expected frequencies are , and its test statistic adds the standardized squared count discrepancies, . For a complete contingency table with positive margins, the large-sample reference chi-squared distribution has statistical degrees of freedom. Independent observations and an appropriate sampling scheme are essential; adequate expected counts make the approximation more plausible.[ref]
Reading only the printed test block, , statistical degrees of freedom and are mutually compatible. The printed likelihood-ratio test gives nearly the same p-value, about . At a prechosen 5% significance level neither rejects independence. This is a failure to find evidence, not proof of equal employment probabilities at every age. The printed Cramér's V around suggests a small sample association; the contingency coefficient around has the same broad message. The generalized phi coefficient is an unsigned chi-squared magnitude here, not evidence for a positive age trend. A small association magnitude and a large p-value answer different questions.
But only a table is actually visible. Those rows total , with employment column sums and , rather than the printed with columns and . Computing solely from the five visible rows gives
Its likelihood-ratio test statistic is about , again with statistical degrees of freedom. The smallest count-based expected frequency is about , comfortably large for this ordinary approximation, but different from the printed minimum . These figures are a labelled analysis of the visible subset, not a repaired full dataset. An unprinted sixth age row might explain some intended metadata, but neither its label nor a uniquely justified reconstruction is supplied. The oldest printed label also conflicts with Figures 1 and 8.
The ordinal measures look for an ordered tendency. Goodman and Kruskal's gamma compares concordant pairs with discordant pairs among pairs untied on both variables. The printed negative gamma, Somers' D, Kendall's tau-b and Stuart's tau-c therefore suggest, at most, a very weak tendency toward lower employment at higher age categories under the specified ordering. Their precise magnitudes are not reliable here. The ordinary unordered-pair partition for ordinal data fails for the printed pair counts, even when compared with the printed cases. On the five visible rows the respective count-based values are about , for employment conditional on age, and . None gives a substantial monotone pattern; a near-zero ordinal measure would not exclude a nonmonotone relationship in general.
Goodman and Kruskal's lambda is zero in both predictive directions on the visible table: knowing age does not improve the number of correct predictions made by always choosing the most common employment category, and knowing employment does not improve modal age-category prediction. Zero modal-prediction improvement does not mean every category distribution is identical. Both the reported test block and the separately recomputed visible-table test fail to reject independence; neither justifies asserting no association, a causal age effect, or a coherent full-sample calculation from the contradictory printout.
Every displayed age stratum has a higher proportion of employed respondents reporting use at least daily, and each has positive ordinal association. The visible counts do not support the printed claim of a conventional significant omnibus result in any one stratum: several test fields are contradictory, and sparse cells further limit the chi-squared approximation. Age-specific significance labels do not establish interaction or causation.
Conditioning on age means comparing the employment groups within each displayed age category. Each within-row percentage estimates a use distribution for that age–employment combination. This helps assess a marginal association that could reflect different age compositions, but broad age categories do not remove all residual confounding. The relevant conditional-independence null hypothesis is that employment and use are independent within every age stratum. It differs both from marginal independence and from a null hypothesis that the strength of association is identical across ages.
For the 14–24 stratum, . The non-employed group reports use at least daily in of cases, versus of employed cases: an 11.13-percentage-point difference. Daily use alone is versus . This is not a uniform upward shift at every threshold: never-use is also higher among employed respondents, versus , whereas weekly use is lower, versus . The count-based Cramér's V is about and Goodman and Kruskal's gamma about . The cells give on statistical degrees of freedom, with , agreeing qualitatively with the likelihood-ratio result , . The printed Pearson and disagree with the cells and with one another: that printed statistic at statistical degrees of freedom would give about , not . Four of twelve expected frequencies are below five, with minimum about , so an exact conditional test or a Monte Carlo test is preferable for calibrated inference rather than trusting a marginal printed significance label.
For ages 25–44, . At-least-daily use is in the non-employed group and in the employed group, a difference of 11.06 percentage points. Never-use is versus , daily use versus , and more-than-daily use versus . The count-based Cramér's V is about and Goodman and Kruskal's gamma about . The visible cells give , , and , , each with statistical degrees of freedom. These differ materially from the printed Pearson , , and printed likelihood-ratio , . Even the printed Pearson statistic at its stated statistical degrees of freedom gives , not the stated p-value. The minimum expected frequency is about , so the principal difficulty here is corrupted numerical output rather than a listed sparse-cell warning. The recomputed 5% test fails to reject independence, although its p-value is not evidence that the positive descriptive contrast is exactly zero.
For ages 45–54, . At-least-daily use is versus , a difference of 9.03 percentage points. Never-use is versus , and daily use versus . The count-based Cramér's V is about and Goodman and Kruskal's gamma about . The cells give , , consistent with the likelihood-ratio , . The printed Pearson and are incompatible with the cells and with one another: using that statistic at statistical degrees of freedom gives . The smallest expected frequency is about . Thus this is another positive descriptive contrast without a count-supported significant omnibus result at 5%.
For ages 55–64, . At-least-daily use is versus , a difference of 7.89 percentage points. Never-use is versus , and daily use versus . Cramér's V is about and Goodman and Kruskal's gamma about . The printed and count-based Pearson result agrees: , statistical degrees of freedom, . The likelihood-ratio p-value is about . Two of twelve expected frequencies are below five, with minimum about ; the nominal result does not indicate rejection, but a simulation-based check would be prudent if formal calibration mattered. Neither a large p-value nor the smaller sample establishes an absence of association.
For the oldest stratum, labelled 65+ in Figure 8, . At-least-daily use is versus , a difference of 5.61 percentage points. Never-use is versus . Cramér's V is about and Goodman and Kruskal's gamma about , the largest of the five displayed strata. Yet on statistical degrees of freedom gives , while the likelihood-ratio p-value is about . There are four expected frequencies below five, with minimum about . Sampling uncertainty and a sparse distribution therefore matter greatly; the larger descriptive ordinal magnitude is not evidence for a significant age interaction. The zero observed entries do not establish zero population probabilities. An exact conditional test or a Monte Carlo test can retain the six categories without relying on a doubtful asymptotic approximation. Collapsing categories should have a substantive justification; searching for a grouping that produces significance changes the inferential problem.[ref]
The following original analytical plot summarizes a common threshold rather than reproducing any source table. Its overall reference is deliberately separated: the five age strata total , not the in Figure 3, so their percentages cannot be pooled and called the reported overall result.
Figure 1.
At-least-daily use is more common among employed respondents in each displayed age stratum; the printed overall row is a separate, non-reconciling input
. Details.
Across the visible strata, frequent use declines strongly with age in both employment groups, while the at-least-daily employment difference remains positive. This is compatible with age being important to the use distribution and with a positive employment association persisting after age stratification. It is not a demonstrated Simpson's paradox: none of these displayed threshold differences reverses direction. The evidence also does not establish how much age confounds the overall result, because the strata do not reproduce its sample and the oldest age labels disagree across figures. Among young respondents the positive ordinal association coexists with a reversed never-use contrast, so the threshold summary should not be described as stochastic domination of every conditional distribution.
Ordinal measures summarize a different aspect from the omnibus tests. Counting pairs from each visible table gives Goodman and Kruskal's gamma approximately in age order. For use as response, the corresponding Somers' D values are about ; Kendall's tau-b values are ; and Stuart's tau-c values are . They are all positive and modest, but not interchangeable. Gamma discards pairs tied on either variable; Somers' D includes response ties separated by employment; Kendall's tau-b adjusts for ties in both variables; Stuart's tau-c adjusts for table dimensions. The printed second-variable tie counts violate the unordered-pair partition for ordinal data in all five strata, so the printed Somers and tau-b values should not be accepted as independently verified numbers.[ref]
Goodman and Kruskal's lambda for predicting the use category from employment is zero in all five visible strata: each employment row has the same modal use category as its stratum overall. This does not contradict their nonzero gamma or V, because the rest of each category distribution can change without its mode changing. Reversing the prediction target gives about for predicting employment from use. In the original display these are the second lambda values; identify the target directly rather than relying on ambiguous row/column-dependent labels. The contingency coefficient, another unsigned transformation of the Pearson statistic, adds no new direction and cannot repair a corrupted test statistic.
Even if all printed p-values were trusted, a significant result in one age group and a nonsignificant result in another would not prove that their effects differ. A statistical interaction needs a direct comparison of effects on a specified scale, not a comparison of significance labels. Five separate tests also create a multiple-testing issue if the aim is to claim at least one association; choosing categories or a threshold after inspection adds further selection. A joint conditional independence test for stratified contingency tables or an appropriate categorical-response model can target a clear combined hypothesis, with exact or simulation-based calibration where needed. Such a model would require coherent input tables before it could resolve the source discrepancies. The sound conclusion is a consistent positive descriptive tendency within the five shown strata, with no count-supported nominal 5% omnibus rejection in an individual stratum, and insufficient coherent output for a claimed causal or precisely quantified age-adjusted effect.