Organizing and Displaying Data
Initial Post Instructions
Suppose that you have two sets of data to work with. The first set is a list of all the injuries that were seen in a clinic in a month's time. The second set contains data on the number of minutes that each patient spent in the waiting room of a doctor's office. You can make assumptions about other information or variables that are included in each data set.
For each data set, propose your idea of how best to represent the key information. To organize your data would you choose to use a frequency table, a cumulative frequency table, or a relative frequency table? Why?
What type of graph would you use to display the organized data from each frequency distribution? What would be shown on each of the axes for each graph?
1 Scholary Reference
Organizing and Displaying Data
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Organizing and Displaying Data
The next step after data collection is systematically organizing the data to make it simple and easier to read. The most common method of summarizing data is by organizing it into tables and graphs. For example, given a clinic dataset containing a list of injuries observed in a month, I will use a relative frequency table to display this data since it is categorical. A relative frequency table shows the number of times a certain event occurs in relation to the total number of events (Sharma et al., 2018). Thus, the relative frequency table will show at a glance the percentages of specific injuries that occurred that month, which can aid in establishing the most common injury.
Given a second dataset containing the number of minutes each patient spent in the waiting room of a doctor's office, I will use a grouped frequency distribution table to display the data since it is continuous. A frequency table summarizes continuous data when the dataset has been arranged into meaningful groups. The frequency distribution table will show the tim...