Abbreviated Y-Axis

Ugh!

I love and hate this video.  I think it is important to point out and discuss the exception to the rules, but this video fails to point out that most people do not intentionally lie with statistics, but do so in an unintentional, misleading way out of ignorance. 

Yes, a lack of context does far more damage than just abbreviating the axis, but that’s a cart-before-the-horse argument to me.  I worked with good-hearted journalists and now, work with great stats and research people everyday and most of the time, it’s innocent ignorance that causes them to travel down the road to mislead their readers and in turn, leave out a lot of context.

They not only abbreviate axis because whatever software they use did it for them, but don’t think enough about the story to even make up for it with context.  Particularly with stats, research, and eval people, they’re worried first with presenting sound numbers that the “story” is the last thing they think of. 

With journalists, the story is their main objective, but unintentionally exaggerate the numbers to further the story and miss out on a lot of truth-telling. They are so desperate sometimes to show that they don’t think about the statistical significance of their numbers and do not necessarily have the skills to determine if the change is worth exaggerating or showing in the first place.

Double axis! Pew pew pew! 

Would have much more interesting as a scatter plot.

Truncated, double axis strikes again! 

Some good points from this blog from Ann K. Emery, but I would venture to add another rule, disagreeing with her visual metaphor: never plot bar charts with a truncated y-axis.  

In bar charts, it’s the length of the bar that indicates the measure of data.  Therefore, it is essential while using this visual metaphor to keep the length equal to the data.

A better, more accurate way to show this data from the start would be a trend chart.  The data are already over time, making a trend chart the better fit regardless of a truncated y-axis.

Truncated + double axes = double trouble

What is this, uh .... I can’t..... even...what?

I think this counts.  I’ve looked at this guy several times and I still can’t figure out what the pie pieces or the size of the pies even mean.