Discussion 2 (DTDS22)

[Matthew Banos]

• Which type of graph do you think is best for showing Flores del Mundo’s membership trends over the course of the year?

• Does your answer change if you’re graphing total membership versus employee/spouse/dependent?

• Does your answer change if you want to show Eastern and Northern on the same graph?

[Samuel Zwetchkenbaum]

Probably bar chart would be good to show membership trends. However if showing employee/spouse/dependent, it may be good to see as lines to see trends better, and similarly for showing Eastern and Northern.

[Maryann Roebuck]

My vote for all three of these would be a line graph – showing trends over time.

[SarahEvan Colvario]

I agree with Maryann – a line graph would be great to see trends over the course of a year. It would work for total membership, or you could have employee and dependents in separate lines to see if the trends are different. Finally, Since there are different trends for Eastern and Northern, I would think you would want to show the trends on the same graph, but with different lines.

[Elizabeth Petit]

I think a line graph would be best for all three so that you can easily see the trends from month to month.

[Riley Smith]

Which type of graph do you think is best for showing Flores del Mundo’s membership trends over the course of the year?

A line graph would be the best option for showing membership trends over time as we are more interested in seeing an overall shape of the total year as opposed to individual months. This would allow us to see if there are any particularly interesting changes between months, as well (such as a spike or drop in membership).

Does your answer change if you’re graphing total membership versus employee/spouse/dependent?

A line graph could also be useful here with different colors representing each category, if the goal is to again visualize the whole year as opposed to smaller scale. However, I would argue that a bar graph might be better here in certain instances. For example, the person viewing the dashboard may be interested in seeing if there are any particular times of year where major changes occur in addition or removal of household members from the plan, as that could give some information on planning ahead for seasonal fluctuations.

Does your answer change if you want to show Eastern and Northern on the same graph?

I think in this case, a bar graph would be most visually useful to indicate what portion of memberships come from each location. If each bar is organized by Total/Location1/Location2, we can see the annual trends of each but more importantly we can see if there are patterns of membership at different locations (e.g., does one location tend to host more memberships than the other?). A line graph would make it harder to visualize the part-to-whole relationship.

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