-hh
Contributor
- Messages
- 1,020
- Reaction score
- 245
This is an interesting question and one that can be a political Hot Potato. For example, I have heard wildly unsubstantiated _rumors_ that DAN has looked at a "By Agency" slice-n-dice in their annual accident report, but was somehow encouraged not to publish it.
In any event, there's really only a couple of factors that go into the answer:
1) PADI is the biggest, so if they're 75% of the diving public, then their divers should incur 75% of the accidents if their training is as good as everyone else's. Naturally, some people can't grok this (and some will maliciously twist it) and will draw invalid conclusions.
2) It is pragmatically impossible to get the data necessary to accurately look at the certifications of actual divers on actual dives instead of the number of divers who were once upon a time certified...a classical "Garbage In - Garbage Out" dilemma. If you can't measure it, its just an opinion.
3) Even if you could come close on measuring things and if a particular Agency is significantly superior in their training and *if* this training does translate into fewer accidents (if you're counting, that's three "ifs"):
a) Are they a large enough segment of the market for it to be measurable?
b) Do their divers dive frequently enough for it to be measurable with significance?
3. Similarly (and interrelated), if we take a small niche Agency such as GUE, who lacks an OW class, how are divers with multiple Agency certifications going to be accounted for?
4. Now that we've looked at easy warmwater OW resort dives, how are we even going to begin to account for and adjust for all of the different types of diving which incur different (higher) risk environments?
5. Ditto age-related risk factors...afterall, PADI wasn't always the biggest, so a larger segment of older divers who have higher heart attack risks and the like are probably NAUI & YMCA divers, and this will skew the data.
6. Finally, at what post-certification dive experience level can we safely claim that the original certification Agency really made no meaningful difference anymore?
In other words, do we really think that a diver with 500+ dives has learned nothing since he originally got certified?
Yeah, its an interesting question, but the statistics of it are a royal mess. At very, very best, I'd look at the statistics of dive accidents with <20 dives and that year's Agency reports for how many new OW divers they pushed out if you're looking to potentally identify a possible Agency-specific risk contributor. However, you'll probably find water temperature and a few other risk/stressors to be sufficient system noise to make any measurable difference fail their significance test.
Nevertheless, I'd personally want a Loved One to have more basic training than what is reportedly par for an OW-I class these days. But I can do this on my own after they've gotten their ticket to learn punched.
-hh
In any event, there's really only a couple of factors that go into the answer:
1) PADI is the biggest, so if they're 75% of the diving public, then their divers should incur 75% of the accidents if their training is as good as everyone else's. Naturally, some people can't grok this (and some will maliciously twist it) and will draw invalid conclusions.
2) It is pragmatically impossible to get the data necessary to accurately look at the certifications of actual divers on actual dives instead of the number of divers who were once upon a time certified...a classical "Garbage In - Garbage Out" dilemma. If you can't measure it, its just an opinion.
3) Even if you could come close on measuring things and if a particular Agency is significantly superior in their training and *if* this training does translate into fewer accidents (if you're counting, that's three "ifs"):
a) Are they a large enough segment of the market for it to be measurable?
b) Do their divers dive frequently enough for it to be measurable with significance?
3. Similarly (and interrelated), if we take a small niche Agency such as GUE, who lacks an OW class, how are divers with multiple Agency certifications going to be accounted for?
4. Now that we've looked at easy warmwater OW resort dives, how are we even going to begin to account for and adjust for all of the different types of diving which incur different (higher) risk environments?
5. Ditto age-related risk factors...afterall, PADI wasn't always the biggest, so a larger segment of older divers who have higher heart attack risks and the like are probably NAUI & YMCA divers, and this will skew the data.
6. Finally, at what post-certification dive experience level can we safely claim that the original certification Agency really made no meaningful difference anymore?
In other words, do we really think that a diver with 500+ dives has learned nothing since he originally got certified?
Yeah, its an interesting question, but the statistics of it are a royal mess. At very, very best, I'd look at the statistics of dive accidents with <20 dives and that year's Agency reports for how many new OW divers they pushed out if you're looking to potentally identify a possible Agency-specific risk contributor. However, you'll probably find water temperature and a few other risk/stressors to be sufficient system noise to make any measurable difference fail their significance test.
Nevertheless, I'd personally want a Loved One to have more basic training than what is reportedly par for an OW-I class these days. But I can do this on my own after they've gotten their ticket to learn punched.
-hh
