by Jason S. Brinkley, PhD, MA, MS

On the Brink addresses topics related to data, analytics, and visualizations on personal health and public health research. This column explores current practices in the health arena and how both the data and mathematical sciences have an impact. (The opinions and views represented here are the author’s own and do not reflect any group for which the author has an association.)

The National Retail Federation (NRF) does a yearly survey to measure consumers’ Halloween shopping behavior. They suggest that over 172 million Americans participate in the holiday and contribute to a $8.8 billion dollar industry. This unique holiday inspires some neat and quick statistics that we will explore again this year.                                       Halloween by Numbers 2019

More from the NRF:

• Average spending is expected to be $86.27, down just slightly from last year’s record $86.79
• 69 percent plan to hand out candy
• 49 percent plan to decorate their home or yard
• 44 percent will carve a pumpkin                                            Halloween by Numbers 2019
• 32 percent will throw or attend a party
• 29 percent will take their children trick-or-treating
• 22 percent will visit a haunted house
• 17 percent will dress their pets in a costume (7.2% as a hotdog)
• There’s no word on the number of adults who plan to dress up as a clown this year, but we can expect 1.4 million zombies.

Candy:

• The 10 most popular Halloween candies in the US are Skittles, Reese’s Cups, M&M’s, Snickers, Starburst, Candy Corn, Hot Tamales, Tootsie Pops, Sour Patch Kids, and Hershey’s, in that order, but there’s some dispute over which candy is the country’s top pick.
• Not surprisingly, every state has a favorite 
• Nutrition content of 19 pieces of candy corn: 140 calories, 0 grams of fat, 32 grams of sugar
• Americans purchase nearly 600 million pounds of candy a year for Halloween
• Someone deconstructed Reese’s cups and found the snack size has between 4 and 5 ounces of peanut butter                                              Halloween by Numbers 2019
• It takes roughly 45 peanuts to make an ounce of peanut butter

Trick or Treat:

• Most who trick-or-treat will do so between 6-8 pm            Halloween by Numbers 2019
• A regular walking pace for children would likely be no more than 2-3 miles per hour. Let’s assume a round trip means about 2.5 miles of trick-or-treating around one location with starts and stops. Assuming about 15 blocks per mile and 4 houses per block means older children may hit 150 houses in a dense neighborhood. Although if houses are larger, then there could be 10 blocks per mile, or smaller and there could be up to 6 houses in a block. So let’s say the range of houses in 2.5 miles of neighborhood could be 90 houses to about 200.
• Approximately 5 children die per year due to child pedestrian accidents on Halloween

Health:

• Be careful of some popular Michigan apples recalled for Listeria risk
• Parents are also urged to check their children’s candy for drug-laced edibles this year
• Nightmares are being reported over a trendy Halloween dish called feetloaf

Don’t forget to check out Safekids.org for great tips to keep kids (and adults) safe, including staying on sidewalks, looking both ways before crossing the street, putting the electronics down, and staying away from adults dressed as zombies. Oh, and this year, Fortnite’s new island has already changed, just in time for Halloween.                                                        Halloween by Numbers 2019

Don’t know what to wear? Consult the frightgeist tool by Google to know the latest costume trends. This year, clowns rule with Pennywise IT costumes taking the top spot and generic clowns coming in at number 6.                                                                Halloween by Numbers 2019

Yeah, we knew it was too good to be true that clowns would be staying home this time. 

Jason S. Brinkley, PhD, MA, MS (Photo: American Institutes for Research)

Jason S. Brinkley, PhD, MS, MA is a Senior Researcher and Biostatistician at Abt Associates Inc. where he works on a wide variety of data for health services, policy, and disparities research. He maintains a research affiliation with the North Carolina Agromedicine Institute and serves on the executive committee for the NC Chapter of the American Statistical Association and the Southeast SAS Users Group. Follow him on Twitter. [Full Bio]

Previous posts in this series:

• How Do Machines Learn? Part 3: They Recover
• How Do Machines Learn? Part 2: They Fight
• How Do Machines Learn? Part 1: They Learn
• Taste Testing Generic Drugs
• Halloween by the Numbers
• What Kills Kids?
• The Golden Age of Health Research Funding
• Does Living on a Prayer Work?
• The Opioid Data Crisis
• Income Lost from Snow Days*
• What the #$@&*! Is Blockchain?
• Opportunistic Research Opportunities
• Text Mining UFO Data: Little Green Aliens or Santa’s Elves?
• Should You Know Your Doctor’s Home Address?
• The Population Bullet
• The Unknown Unknowns of Missing Data
• Communicating Science–More Than Just Good Words?
• Counting Alabamas
• The Third World in Your Own Backyard
• The Unrealistic Gold Standard
• Does MACRA Signal the Beginning of the End for Medicare Claims Data?
• Think You Aren’t Extraordinary? Odds Are You’re Wrong
• Mapping by Words
• Are We Asking Too Much From Surveys?
• Making Better Comparisons
• What Kills Us?