Contra Events Pairing Callers By Age?

jefftk
Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:20:12 GMT

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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