Discussion 4 (DTDW23)

[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?

[Rachel Bedenbaugh]

I have not encountered many box-and-whisker plots in my work. I have seen them in academic journals recently related to work. I do not feel like they are intuitive to the average reader. Now that I know what they are and what each component represents, I think it will be a bit easier to interpret data when I see them in this format moving forward.

I have seen a few histograms….but again I feel like bar charts & line graphs are charts I have commonly come in contact with and/or used to display data.

[Tomeka Frieson]

I’ve encountered box-and-whisker plots in academic settings and a couple of times in academic research papers. However, I don’t recall having ever encountered box-and-whisker plots on other dashboards.

I have definitely encountered histograms before–again, most often in academic papers or in academic settings.

While I have prior experience with box-and-whisker plots and histograms, I don’t think that they are particularly intuitive for the everyday reader without a legend or textual explanation. I know that bell curves have been a bit more commonly used to illustrate data like population data, so that might be another option.

[Keianna Lopes]

1. I have not come across a lot of box and whisker plots in my current work in public health however, we used them frequently in my research lab. I feel like it just goes to show it depends on intended audience. Box and whisker plots are great for those who have a deeper understanding of Statistical analysis however, for the average population it would be more confusing.

2.Histograms I see much more frequently in public health as well as my prior experience in research.

3.I feel like box and whisker plots can be very confusing for people who don’t work with statistics. However, I feel like histograms are more intuitive. If I needed to pick another option for people to use for distribution data density plots can also be helpful. However, they can be more difficult to understand if density isn’t high enough.

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