MATH 225N Week 2 Discussion: Graphing and Describing Data in Everyday Life

Sample Answer for MATH 225N Week 2 Discussion: Graphing and Describing Data in Everyday Life Included After Question

Required Resources

Read/review the following resources for this activity:

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?

Follow-Up Post Instructions

Respond to at least two peers or one peer and the instructor. Further the dialogue by providing more information and clarification.

Consider how different distributions might affect the different graphs. How might other variables affect the graphs? How could graphs be made to be biased? If a graph were biased, how might you change it to guard against that bias?

Writing Requirements

Minimum of 3 posts (1 initial & 2 follow-up)
APA format for in-text citations and list of references

Grading

This activity will be graded using the Discussion Grading Rubric. Please review the following link:

Link (webpage): Discussion Guidelines

Course Outcomes (CO): 3

Due Date for Initial Post: By 11:59 p.m. MT on Wednesday

Due Date for Follow-Up Posts: By 11:59 p.m. MT on Sunday

This topic is closed for comments.

Greetings Class Members !!

  For grading purposes, this particular discussion posting area runs from Sunday Jan 10 through Sunday Jan 17, inclusively.

Click here to ORDER an A++ paper from our Verified MASTERS and DOCTORATE WRITERS:MATH 225N Week 2 Discussion: Graphing and Describing Data in Everyday Life

We continue to explore Descriptive Statistics and the fundamentals of sampling techniques and quantitative research and research design this Week. This includes data, experimental design, so-called descriptive statistics, distributions, graphs and graphical displays, and measures of central tendency, variation, and position. At a somewhat basic and introductory level, we sometimes try to describe distributions using concepts of “shape, center, and spread.” Central tendency refers to “center” and variation refers to “spread.”

  Please don’t forget to use an “outside” resource as part of the content and documentation for your first Post – the Post which is due on or before Wednesday of the Week – the Post where you make the most major contribution to the Weekly discussion posting area and attempt to address the discussion prompts / cues for the Week.  It could possibly include a web site that you discovered on the internet at large, so long as the web site is relevant and substantial and does not violate the Chamberlain University policy for prohibited web sites, and so forth.  It could possibly include references / resources that you discover through making use of the online Chamberlain University Library ( please click Resources along the left and then click Library to discover the link to the Chamberlain University online Library  

Please check out the link below to see some of the key similarities and key differences between Bar Plots / Graphs / Charts and Histograms.

Link (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

This is one kind of an example of using an “outside” source / resource to add to what is revealed in our Weekly Lesson in Modules and in our Weekly text book reading.

  Please don’t forget to look over the Graded Discussion Posting Rubric each Week to be certain that you are meeting all of the Frequency requirements as well as all of the Quality requirements for graded discussion posting each Week.

  If you have any questions about anything, please do not hesitate to post in the Q & A Forum discussion posting area or to send me a direct e-mail message to  [email protected]

  Thanks Friends and Good Luck !  Work hard and learn a lot !!

 Sincerely,  Mr. Smith     Chamberlain University     Math, Statistics, and Quantitative Research

  [email protected]

A Sample Answer For the Assignment: MATH 225N Week 2 Discussion: Graphing and Describing Data in Everyday Life

Title: MATH 225N Week 2 Discussion: Graphing and Describing Data in Everyday Life

Hello everyone:

For the first question, I created a frequency table of a list of injuries one might see in a walk-in clinic over the past month:

Rather than sort alphabetically, I sorted from highest number of injuries to lowest and then created a horizontal bar graph with the types of injuries on the y axis simply as a matter of preference, since either is acceptable in a bar graph (Holmes, Illowsky and Dean, 2018):

It might be interesting to see where the data falls over the course of many months using a cumulative review of the frequency of the various injuries. I would expect bee stings to increase during warmer weather when people spend more time outside, therefore the clinic would have data to be well prepared to treat those injuries. A histogram wouldn’t be useful here, as the labels are categorical, not quantitative (Stattrek, 2020).

For the second question, Let’s assume the following wait time in minutes for a given day: 5, 5, 5, 5, 9, 10, 10, 15, 15, 30, 30, 35, 35, 40, 45, 60, 65, 70, 70, 75. First, I created a frequency table, but using the math rules taught us this week in the Knewton Lesson on frequency tables (Chamberlain University, 2020), I really didn’t care for the groups of times created, so I created a second table using increments of 15 minutes since the frequency outcome didn’t change:

I like a pie chart best to show that while most people (45%) only had a wait of less than 15 minutes, still another 45% had waits of more than 30 minutes. This pie chart makes it easy to see where improvement needs to be made.

https://stattrek.com/statistics/charts/histogram.aspx?Tutorial=APLinks to an external site.

Holmes, A., Illowsky, B., & Dean, S.  (2018).  Introductory business statistics.  OpenStax

Chamberlain University, (2020). MATH225. Week 2 Knewton Lesson Frequency Tables (online lesson). Downers Grove, IL. Adtalem.

The way that you were able to visually present then describe the data was phenomenal. I appreciate how easy it is to understand both the graphs and their results. It is easy to draw conclusions based on the data available. 

 Maybe you want to think of a second career as a statistician? Excellent work.

Thanks! Actually, I think I goofed up the bins the first time I did the frequency chart. I’m a little dyslexic.

Hello,

First of all, wow! I am impressed with your charts. This may be a really stupid question, but how did you get them to paste into the discussion board? I had mine pasted into  my word document, but for the life of me could not get them to paste on here.  I will also admit. I have not used an Excel spread sheet in years and for work, our administrative assistants do that for us, so I am technologically an idiot.    I stayed up until 2 am this morning fighting with trying to get it pasted into my discussion post with  no luck.  I would appreciate it if you could share your secret!

Thanks,

Thanks for your visuals!  I have always, even before this class, liked pie charts.  To me, they provide the best, quickest representation of the statistical data.  I mean, it literally (I mean visually) right there.  The only work you would need to do for a quick analysis, is to refer to the key.  Do you agree, or do you have your own favorite?      For data set 1, the graph does not seem to be biased since the x-axis is equally spaced. It is also a good idea to sort the injuries from lowest to highest frequency because it made the graph easier to understand. For data set 2, I think since the data is continuous, histograms are more appropriate to use. This would make sure that the distribution of the data is taken accounted for. Different distributions have different effects on the graphs. For example, if the data is normally distributed, the histogram would look bell-shaped. On contrary, if it is normally distributed, the bars of the histogram would approximately be equal.

      I have a question.  If you sorted the injuries from lowest to highest frequency to make the graph easier to understand on this data set, how would you make the next months’ graphs if the results changed?   Would the graph still be organized lowest to highest frequency of injuries or stay in the same order as the first month?  I used alphabetical order for the injuries in my frequency table and on my histogram.  I was thinking of the results in the following months if the study was going to continue.  If the amount of each injury changes and is recorded on the graph, my injuries would be in the same position and yours would potentially be in different positions. The different positions might be harder to compare when two or more graphs of the months were viewed side by side.

Excellent post, I really enjoyed reading it. You showed a great knowledge and dexterity doing it. It was very illustrative and explanatory. I would like to know how do it but still it could be hard for me. Thanks for sharing with us that excellent work.