Numeracy & Quantitative Methods: Numeracy for Professional Purposes

Laura Lake

Recap
Types of data Descriptive statistics

Interpreting data
Presenting data to different audiences.

Graphs
Choice of graph dependent on data type.
Nominal Ordinal Scale (interval or ratio) Pie chart or bar chart Pie chart or bar chart Line graph, histogram

Nominal and ordinal data based on the selection of categories (yes or no, strongly agree to strongly disagree) - therefore graphs need to have categories (bars or pie slices) Scale data numeric therefore line graphs or histograms.

Pie charts
Pie charts use a slice or segment for each category.

Each slice is shown in relation to the whole pie.

It is often used for nominal data. It can be sometime hard to judge relative size of each slice if there is no real difference in size between them. It is not particularly useful when there are a large number of categories leads to too many slices of the pie and can look confusing. Useful to include value labels stating % for each category.

Pie charts
Chart 1: Hours worked per week
17% 15%

32%

36%

1 to 15 hours 31 hours or more

16 to 30 hours Not currently working

Bar charts
Bar charts use a bar to represent each category.

Size of each bar is clear.

Easy to judge relative size of bars. Better for ordinal data: shows order of categories. Useful for comparing categories with clustered bar charts.

Bar charts (single)

Chart 2: Age of respondents in years
30 25 20 17 15 10 5 9 13 13 19 28

Percentage

0
Under 19 19 to 24 25 to 39 40 to 49 Age in years 50 to 64 65 and over

Bar charts (clustered)

Chart 3: Age of respondents in years by gender
Male 35 30 25 Percentage 20 15
11 11 18 19 33

Female

27 25

18

10 5 0

10

10 10

Under 19

19 to 24

25 to 39 40 to 49 Age in years

50 to 64

65 and over

Histograms
Bar charts for categorical data. With scale data (interval or ratio) use histograms.

Difference between bar charts and histograms bars touch to represent continuous data.
A histogram is constructed from a frequency table.
Intervals from the frequency table are placed on the horizontal axis (x-axis) Values needed for the frequencies are represented on the horizontal axis (y-axis). The frequencies are depicted by the height of a bar corresponding to each interval.

Histograms
EXAMPLE:

Consider the following interval data set: 4, 9, 10, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 29, 32, 35, 38, 39, 46, 47.
A graph which shows how many of each value occurred (e.g. number of 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s and so on) which is meaningless. Put the data into ranges (called bins). Instead we bin the data into convenient ranges. This data set uses a bin width of 10.
Data range 1 to 10 10 to 20 20 to 30 Frequency 2 2 5

30 to 40
40 to 50

4
2

Histograms
Chart 4: Age of respondents in years
6 5 5 4 Mean = 26.3 Median = 23.5 Standard deviation = 13.3

4
Frequency 3 2 1 0 1-10 2 2

10-20 20-30 30-40 Age in years

40-50

Line graphs
Scale data (interval or ratio) can use line graphs. Shows a simple representation of the data. Is particularly useful for showing a change in scale data over time.
Chart 5: Temperature (C) over one week
25

Temperature (C)

20
15 10 5 0 1 2 3 4 Day 5 6 7

Line graphs
If showing a distribution of values in one variable sometimes if can be easier to display this in a histogram.
Chart 6: Test scores for students, 2011
Test scores 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1 2 3 4 5 Student 6 7 8 9

Test score

References
Bryman, A. (2008) Social Research Methods. 3rd Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. David, M. and Sutton, C. (2011) Social Research : An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Sage.

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Author Institute Title Description Date Created Educational Level Keywords
Laura Lake

University of Plymouth
Numeracy & Quantitative Methods Numeracy for Professional Purposes Interpreting data: graphs and charts 1 May 2011 Level 4 Learning from WOeRK Work Based Learning WBL Continuous Professional Development CPD Research UKOER LFWOER Bar chart, pie chart, histogram

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