Abstract
The Graphical Display of Data is an important tool for presenting statistical results in such a way that the key features or characteristics of an analysis are highlighted. There are many different ways the same data might be displayed. Indeed, many books have been written that focus entirely on graphical presentation of data. In this chapter, we introduce some common ways of representing data in graphical form, along with suggestions for effectively presenting information in an accurate way. We begin by discussing the most basic way of summarizing—and then graphing—data: frequency distributions and histograms. Building on the discussion of histograms, we move on to more general bar charts, noting the variety of information that can be presented in bar and pie charts. Finally, we examine how graphs can be used to represent a series of observations over time.
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Notes
- 1.
The College Board, 2001 College-Bound Seniors: A Profile of SAT Program Test Takers, accessed at http://www.collegeboard.com/sat/cbsenior/yr2001/pdf/NATL.pdf.
- 2.
Most statistical software and spreadsheet packages allow for manipulation of many characteristics of a bar chart, including color, shading, patterning, and dimensions (two vs. three). While this allows for the construction of unique charts, the investigator should be wary of adding so much detail to a chart that the reader loses the point the investigator is trying to make.
- 3.
For a good discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of various approaches, see Gary T. Henry, Graphing Data: Techniques for Display and Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).
- 4.
Capital Punishment in the United States, ICPSR Study #6956, available through the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ NACJD.
- 5.
The entire GSS database is publicly available and can be accessed at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS. icpsr.umich.edu/GSS. Data presented here are drawn from a 1991 study.
- 6.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, available at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm. fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm.
- 7.
Throughout the text, we will make use of user-written procedures for Stata. The process will be very much the same every time we execute one of these commands to make a procedure available within Stata. If you are working on a computer in a student computer lab setting, you will need to install these kinds of procedures every time you move to a different machine and run Stata.
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Weisburd, D., Britt, C. (2014). Representing and Displaying Data. In: Statistics in Criminal Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9170-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9170-5_3
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