A friend
observed
a pattern where contra dance events seem to be pairing older and
younger callers. I looked over my
notes
for two-caller events in 2025 and saw [1]:
Two older callers: 33 events
One of each: 30 events
Two younger callers: 4 events
Seems pretty clear evidence of pairing, no? But this actually turns
out to be what you’d expect to see if organizers ignored age.
With 67 two-caller events there are 134 slots. Of these, 96 (72%)
went to older callers and 38 (28%) went to younger ones. So there are
four possibilities:
caller 1 older
caller 1 younger
caller 2 older
72% * 72%
28% * 72%
caller 2 younger
72% * 28%
28% * 28%
This gives us:
Two older callers: 34 events (72% * 72%), vs 33 observed
One of each: 27 events (72% * 28% + 28% * 72%), vs 30 observed
Two younger callers: 5 events (28% * 28%), vs 4 observed
While this is very slightly in the direction you’d expect if
organizers preferred to match different-age callers, it’s well within
what you could get by chance. It looks to me like this is just “two
moderately rare events both happening is very rare.”
We can compare this to the situation with gender, where you consistently
get male-female pairs more often than you’d expect by chance:
The biggest caveat, though, is that this is based on a count of just
one year’s bookings. If I had more time, I’d like to go back over all
the past
data and count, but I really don’t.
[1] Age is continuous, so this bucketing is somewhat arbitrary. Since
most callers are either baby boomers or millennials, though, I do think
there are two meaningful groups. I also don’t know how old almost
anyone actually is, so am just guessing from appearance.
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