Discussion 4 (DTDW21)

I rarely use box-and-whisker plots and histograms in the day-to-day of my job but I have encountered them in presentations of clinical trial data. These data presentations are normally developed by other members of my team so I have not yet had experience in creating one other than in this course.

I do find them easy to understand and especially beneficial to show the statistical results of a clinical trial rather than solely reading a statistical analysis. Having a visual representation of the distribution of the data certainly makes it much easier to draw conclusions and present these conclusions to others who are not specifically involved in the clinical trial.

I do not use box-and-whisker plots in my current role and rarely use histograms. However, I am familiar with both box-and-whisker plots and histograms, and have had experience of creating and using them extensively in academic settings.

I have seen both box-and-whisker plots and frequency histograms used for reporting clinical and academic research data. Depending on the shape of the data, researchers I’ve known often prefer box-and-whisker plots for visualizing and comparing different sets of data. Though, these can be a headache for people to create and edit for their presentations. An alternate way to show a very small distribution is a stemplot, although I’ve never actually seen these used.

I have not encountered many box-and-whisker plots or histograms in the course of my work, nor on other dashboards. I find them easy to understand and useful as a visual representation of distribution data. I think that histograms are probably easy for broad audiences to understand but box-and-whisker plots may be less intuitive for lay audiences. Box-and-whisker plots are probably more useful in academic settings and for audiences with some background in statistics and/or research.