| Sumario: | Headlines in the "Times-Dispatch" for October 8, 1951 told that "Big United States Traffic Toll is a Blot on Nation: State Shares Blame." The text was based on figures just released by the National Safety Council on deaths by motor-vehicle by state of accident, 1950. The national average was 7.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles, and the figure for Virginia was 9.2. The "Times-Dispatch" suggested the usual reasons for the high rate in Virginia are speeding, drunk drivers, state highway patrol undermanned, etc., and it outlined a program calculated to reduce the rate in the future. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how a simple statistical tool may assist in the discovery of the existence or the absence of identifiable causes of apparent differences between the behavior of the populations in different areas or classes. The discovery of differences and the causes of differences embrace a great deal of sociological research. The application here is to the causes of variation, from one area to another, in the rates of deaths from motor vehicles.
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