Research and data, obviously, go hand in hand. One cannot expect to have a successful research experiment without the proper representation and description of data. Data can be represented in a number of manners, but not all methods are best suited for all data. For example, a scatter plot would be acceptable to present a correlation or to illustrate a regression. To represent a comparison, however, a box plot, where each measure of central tendency is easily displayed, should be used.  There are, of course, numerous other ways to display data, but for purposes of this blog post, I only highlight these two.

As noted in lecture, the way in which data is represented can alter the perceptions of your target audience. Strides to prevent this from happening have been made and include practices such as peer review. Because of this fact, it is very rare for someone to come across scholarship containing misleading representations of data. Regardless of this fact, instances of misreported results occur.  As an example, I will describe to you a very frustrating moment in my 11 year old life. I was sitting in the waiting room of my dentist, reading one of those generic dentist magazines. While I can’t recall the title of the magazine or study, the scatter plot was displaying the relationship between how often children flossed and how likely they were to require braces. (The study was limited to the Northern New Jersey area). On the “Y” axis, they numbered how many children flossed, and on the “X” axis, they counted how many teenagers required braces. Even in my untrained, 11 year old mind, I recognized immediately the flaws in this graph. First and foremost, I remember thinking that this study did a poor job of displaying their data. You couldn’t really see any sort of trend or obvious link by simply looking at the graph.

I remember thinking that if I had the chance to display their data, I would have chosen a bar graph where the results could be easily read. I was only 11 and I felt I could have done a better job at representing this study’s results. Therefore, the study no longer held any credibility; their flawed graph was the reason I stopped flossing. Had the graph been done better, maybe I wouldn’t have required braces when I was thirteen.