Discussion 4 (DTDW22)

[Liz Lewis]

• Have you encountered many/any box-and-whisker plots in the course of your work? On other dashboards?

• What about histograms?

• If you have little or no prior experience with them, do you think they are easy to understand? If not, can you think of some alternate ways to display distribution data?

[Chana Weiner (Rosenbaum)]

While I have dealt with a lot of different data depictions at work, I have not encountered any histograms or box and whisker plots. I do think they’re very easy to understand, but we mostly stick to bar graphs and tables bringing in data from pivot tables.

[Tyler Sherman]

I have not, mostly in my undergraduate studies with statistics courses. I am going to begin projects that analyze individual and accumulative grades for various courses, which I believe could benefit from box and whisker plots

I think with some explanation they make sense, but quartiles and percentiles often go over the heads of folks who do not look at numbers often.

[Annie Pro]

I have only encountered them during my time as an MPH student. I think histograms are easy to understand and box-whisker plots can be easily digested with some explanations.

[Julia D’Ambrosio]

I have not encountered many box and whisker plots or histograms during my MPH.
I think they are easy to understand, but I think the histograms are a little easier than the box and whisker plots.
I like how the box and whisker plots show the outliers in the data set, and I think for a data set with more variance they are useful.

For alternatives, I would use a bar graph to represent the data. I think it looks similar to a histogram in how it distributes the data. They both convey the shape of the data well.

[Emma Warren]

I have not actually encountered many (or any) box-and-whisker plots in the course of my work or in dashboards I have come across. I have not seen many histograms either.

That being said, I think it is mostly easy to understand them. Having bins seems useful to quickly and easily show data that fits into certain categories. Box-and-whisker plots I think look most useful in identifying those outliers which might otherwise skew the interpretation of a dashboard.

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