Graphing and Describing Data

For the first set of data, a list of all the injuries seen in a clinic over a month, I would use a frequency table and include the relative frequency. Relative frequency would be the ratio of the number of each injury to the number of total injuries seen in the clinic. This would give a good idea in percentage form of how often the clinic is seeing each type of injury. I would choose to display this data in a pie chart. A pie chart is visually easy to read and is good for qualitative data and relative frequencies (Chamberlain College, n.d.). The size of each slice of pie is proportional to the data value in each category (Williams & Anderson, 2020). By using a pie chart for this data, it would be easy to quickly look and see which injuries the clinic is seeing the most of, and which injuries are less commonly being seen. For the second set of data, the number of minutes that each patient spends in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, I would use a cumulative frequency table. The cumulative frequency uses each relative frequency and adds it to the next, making it cumulative. I would use this method to organize the data because then I could look and see what percentage of patients are waiting a certain amount of time or less. For example, if the relative frequency of patients waiting 10 minutes is 0.25 and the relative frequency of patients waiting 20 minutes is 0.6, then that means that the cumulative frequency is 0.85. This indicates that 85% of patients are waiting 20 minutes or less to be seen by the doctor. I would choose to display this data with a stem and leaf plot. This is a good choice when you have a smaller number of data points (Holmes, Illowsky, & Dean, 2017). The stem would include the “tens”, and the leaf would include the “ones”. Because a doctor’s office probably doesn’t see a very large number of patients in a day, this would be a good option to easily display this data in minutes waited. Marissa Whitmore References: Chamberlain College of Nursing. (n.d.). Week 2 lesson: Graphing and describing data. https://chamberlain.instructure.com/courses/65726/pages/week-2-lesson-graphing-and-describing-data?module_item_id=8751247 Holmes, A., Illowsky, B., & Dean, S. (2017). Introductory business statistics. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/details/books/introductory-business-statistics (Links to an external site.) Williams, T., & Anderson, D. (2020, February 03). Statistics. Retrieved July 13, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/science/statistics