Question

What types of information can the visual display of data provide to researchers? Include examples to support your response.

Answer 1

Data visualization is the presentation of data in a pictorial or graphical format. It enables decision makers to see analytics presented visually, so they can grasp difficult concepts or identify new patterns. With interactive visualization, you can take the concept a step further by using technology to drill down into charts and graphs for more detail, interactively changing what data you see and how it’s processed.

Visual displays help in the presentation of inferences and conclusions and represent ways of organizing, summarizing, simplifying, or transforming data. Data displays such as matrices and networks are often utilized to enhance data analysis and are more commonly seen in quantitative than in qualitative studies.

Data visualization can also:

• Identify areas that need attention or improvement.
• Clarify which factors influence customer behavior.
• Help you understand which products to place where.
• Predict sales volumes

Examples:

1. Pie-Chart can be used to plot the way I spend my time in a day.
2. Scatter Plot can be used to check the relation between temperature and no. of ice-cream customers.
3. Line graphs are used to track changes over short and long periods of time. When smaller changes exist, line graphs are better to use than bar graphs. Line graphs can also be used to compare changes over the same period of time for more than one group. Example: a finance department may plot the change in the amount of cash the company has on hand over time.
4. Area graphs are very similar to line graphs. They can be used to track changes over time for one or more groups. Area graphs are good to use when you are tracking the changes in two or more related groups that make up one whole category. Example: In the area chart of the exam scores, you can see that the scores are generally increasing over time even without knowing the exact scores on any single exam.