MATH 225N Week 2 Discussion: Graphing and Describing Data in Everyday Life
Required Resources
Read/review the following resources for this
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OpenStax Book: Chapter 2.. Section 2.1
Lesson
Minimum of 1 scholarly source
In your reference for this assignment, be sure to include both your text/class materials AND your outside reading(s).
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?
NB: 2 Answers Displayed
Answer 1
Graphing and Describing Data in Everyday Life
Both sets of data are quantitative and should be organized in a manner that allows for the generation of relevant inferences. The first set of data comprises of a list of all the injuries that were seen in a clinic in a month's time, and can be best represented using a cumulative frequency table. Data organized using a cumulative frequency table. Assuming that the hospital has been reporting an average number of injuries over the past year, the cumulative frequency would be very useful in determining the number of injuries that lie above or below the mean value.
The second set contains data on the number of minutes that each patient spent in the waiting room of a doctor's office, and frequency table would be useful in this case because most patient wait times will be identical, and a frequency table would provide a good representation of the data as grouped data, especially along with their corresponding frequencies. A frequency table will provide an overview of all distinct values and the number of times they occur.
Graphs provide an excellent opportunity for researchers to establish trends in the data collected (Nolan & Perrett, 2016). To graph the first set of data, a line graph would be very useful in representing the set of data values in a manner that demonstrates variation in the frequency of the injuries with time. This means that the x-axis would have the time and the y-axis would have the number of injuries, thus, providing a general pattern in the data sets as noted by Holmes, Illowsky, and Dean (2018).
The second set of data can be best represented using a histogram graph because is considered the best with continuous quantitative data (Holmes et al., 2018). The data (wait times) will be put into classes or bins with regular intervals and frequency counts. The frequency for each bin would be graphed on the y-axis while the bins would be on the x-axis.
References
Holmes, A., Illowsky, B. & Dean, S. (2018). Introductory business statistics. Houston, Texas: OpenStax.
Nolan, D., & Perrett, J. (2016). Teaching and learning data visualization: Ideas and assignments. The American Statistician, 70(3), 260-269.
Answer 2
In order to properly document the data for injuries seen in the clinic over a month, I would need to first set my parameters. I would divide the injuries into categories such as intentional injuries (suicide attempts), unintentional injuries, homicidal injuries, and undetermined. I would use the relative frequency chart (representing the percentage of the occurrences). The types of injuries would go in one column of the frequency table, occurrences in another column, and relative frequency in the last column. I would then make a pie chart utilizing the percentages of these injuries as I believe it more visually pleasing at showing percentages at a glance. According to US Department of Health (2008) p. 21, a study was performed on these parameters utilizing data from Emergency Departments. That study indicated that 67 percent of injuries were unintentional, 19% were suicidal, 11% were homicidal and 3% were undetermined. Another way of doing this would be to use a frequency table with age variables as well as injury types.
For the second set of data to determine number of minutes spent waiting in the doctor’s office, I visited the journal article by Ahmad, A., Khairatul, K., and Farnaza, A. (2017) whom chose a time period for their study and utilized a universal sampling method selecting everyone who attended the clinic during the study period excluding certain parameters that they pre-determined. I would use a frequency table with the percentile on the side and wait time in increments of 15 minutes on the bottom utilizing a bar graph to indicate wait times. For graphing this. There were multiple study’s done using various data. The outcome was that 91.93% waited less than 90 minutes. For myself, I would like to see the statistical data on pure wait times not including lab and x-ray which may skew the times.
Ahmad, B. A., Khairatul, K., & Farnaza, A. (2017). An assessment of patient waiting and consultation time in a primary healthcare clinic. Malaysian family physician : the official journal of the Academy of Family Physicians of Malaysia, 12(1), 14–21.
US Department of Health, (March 2008) DHHS publication no. 2008-1003. Injury in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/injury2007.pdf [Show Less]