NAME: The Draft Lotteries of 1970, 1971, and 1972 TYPE: Randomized SIZE: Ranks are assigned to each birthdate relevant for the draft in 1970, 1971, and 1972, and a rank is assigned to each letter of the alphabet. DESCRIPTIVE ABSTRACT: The 1970 draft lottery for birthdates provides an example of a government effort at randomization whose inadequacy can be exhibited by a wide variety of statistical approaches. In a lottery held in December 1969, the days of the year were permuted in order to arrive at the order in which young men would be drafted during the Vietnam war. Whether the permutations were "fair" in this lottery and in subsequent ones can be studied from several different points of view using these data. SOURCES: Fienberg, S. E. (1973), "Randomization for the Selective Service Draft Lotteries," in _Statistics by Example: Finding Models_, eds. F. Mosteller, W. H. Kruskal, R. F. Link, R. S. Pieters, and G. R. Rising, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 1-13. United States Selective Service System (1971), "Semiannual Report of the Director of Selective Service for the period July 1 to December 31, 1971 to the Congress of the United States," Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, p. 60. VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS: The datasets draft70yr.dat, draft71yr.dat, and draft72yr.dat contain the lottery data for 1970, 1971, and 1972, respectively, in stacked format. Values are aligned and delimited by blanks. Note that the 1971 dataset contains only 365 days. Columns 1 - 3 Day of the year from 1 through 366 6 - 8 Rank assigned to day 11 - 12 Month of the year between 1 and 12 The datasets draft70mn.dat, draft71mn.dat, and draft72mn.dat contain the lottery data for 1970, 1971, and 1972, respectively, in unstacked format. Values are aligned and delimited by blanks. The number of ranks for each month equals the number of days in that month and varies from 28 to 31. Columns 3 - 5 Ranks assigned to days in January 7 - 9 Ranks assigned to days in February 11 - 13 Ranks assigned to days in March 15 - 17 Ranks assigned to days in April 19 - 21 Ranks assigned to days in May 23 - 25 Ranks assigned to days in June 27 - 29 Ranks assigned to days in July 31 - 33 Ranks assigned to days in August 35 - 37 Ranks assigned to days in September 39 - 41 Ranks assigned to days in October 43 - 45 Ranks assigned to days in November 47 - 49 Ranks assigned to days in December The dataset draftalpha.dat contains the alphabetic lottery data, which were used to order draftees with the same birthdate according to the first letters of their names. Values are aligned and delimited by blanks. There are no missing values. Columns 1 - 2 Integers from 1 to 26 5 Permutation of the 26 letters of the alphabet 8 - 9 Integers between 1 and 26 corresponding to the letters in column 5 STORY BEHIND THE DATA: During the Vietnam war young men were drafted for military service. In an attempt to expose them fairly to the risk of being drafted, a lottery was held on December 1, 1969, to allocate birthdates at random: 366 capsules, each containing a unique day of the year, were successively drawn from a container. The first date drawn (September 14) was assigned rank 1, the second date drawn (April 24) was assigned rank 2, and so on. Those eligible for the draft who were born on September 14 were called first for physicals, then those born on April 24 were tapped, and so on. Soon after the lottery, a pattern of unfairness in the results led to considerable publicity: those with birthdates later in the year seemed to have had more than their share of low lottery numbers and hence were more likely to be drafted. The beauty of the 1970 draft lottery data is that students can confirm the nonrandomness in the lottery process by a wide variety of approaches. Moreover, they can apply to the other draft lotteries the methods developed for the 1970 one. PEDAGOGICAL NOTES: These datasets can be explored and analyzed using a variety of statistical techniques, including scatterplots, correlation, side-by-side boxplots, chi-square tests, and t-tests. The simple question of whether the lottery was fair allows students to develop different approaches at different stages of an introductory course. Additional information on the pedagogical uses of these data can be found in the "Datasets and Stories" article "Nonrandom Risk: The 1970 Draft Lottery" in the _Journal of Statistics Education_ (Starr 1997). REFERENCES: Additional references are given in the associated "Datasets and Stories" article. SUBMITTED BY: Norton Starr Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Box 2239 Amherst College Amherst, MA 01002-5000 nstarr@amherst.edu