Question

suppose 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. Propose your idea of how to represent the key information.To organize your data would you choose to use a frequency table,a culmative frequency table, or avrelative frequency table?Why?

Answer 1

In order to get a clear idea by just looking into the graph or table that summarizes the whole data is very useful. A pie diagram or histogram is very useful to understand the information contained in the data. Such methods are called visual way. Frequency is a measure of how often something occurs. A frequency table is used to measure and visually show how often a data value occurs. The first data set is a list of all injuries that were seen in a clinic. We can use a pie diagram or histogram to show this data by plotting different types of injuries. For histogram we can use cumulative or relative frequency.

I would use the relative frequency table to display the list of all injuries that were seen in a month’s time. This will help to point out the most common injury.

Here both data is quantitative. For the first data the most appropriate way to organize it is by using the cumulative frequency table. Firstofall assume that the clinic has been reporting an average number of injuries over the past year, then the cumulative frequency is very helpful to find whether in the current year the clinic is reporting number of injuries is above or below the mean value or that or of the past year.

The second data set contains data on the number of minutes that each patient spent in the waiting room of a doctor's office.in this case a frequency table is very useful since the waiting time is approximately identical. In this data there may be exists same waiting time so a frequency table is most appropriate. The frequency table provide an overview of all distinct values along with their number of times occur.