"The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations."
Kind of burying the lead.
"Taking into consideration" Making shit up
I'm more interested in how many people actually hear voices, not memory, interior monologue, or day dreaming. Unbidden commentary by a voice of another that is distinguishable from reality only by deduction.
There being an acceptable way to do so doesn't mean it tells you anything meaningful about the world.
Getting widely divergent numbers means to me that we don't have any accurate understanding.
First stating the range within the existing literature is useful and common practice, at least within academic article writing.
It also doesn't generally mean that any numbers mentioned in the article thereafter are derived by the author mashing the results together and getting some number in between, they are picked from the papers that are referenced at the bottom of the piece.
So here, the wider range is being pulled from one paper that is a wide historical review, the narrower range and estimates for amount of people who hear voices without a recognized mental illness, are pulled from another paper, also a review of existing literature, but one that narrows the scope to more recent research. And then the numbers in the article for the amount of people who link their voices to their God, is the subject of another paper.
It seems that much of what passes for social sciences isn't really science.
The sane ones know better than to tell people that they hear voices.
>"Research supports the view that hearing hallucinatory voices is not by itself an indicator of mental illness. Estimates of the percentage of people in the general population without a known psychiatric illness who report auditory hallucinations vary widely. One review of seventeen surveys from nine countries found prevalence estimates as low as fewer than 1% to as high as 84%. Estimates of college students who have reported hearing hallucinatory voices have ranged from 13% to 71%. The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations. Taking into consideration such methodological differences, some researchers estimate the prevalence of hearing voices in the general population to be between 5% and 28%, with 75% of people who report hearing voices to be psychologically healthy. Research suggests also that the prevalence of auditory verbal hallucinations varies by gender, age and culture."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/longing-nostalgia/...