Abstract
It is tempting, but wrong, to believe that graphical techniques have little to offer for serious researchers in economics, statistics, or policy analysis. Their true power comes from the ability of the eye to discern patterns in a graph that are not clearly evident from lists of numbers or tabulated statistics. In Tufte’s pithy phrase, “graphics reveal data” (Tufte 2001, p. 13).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For a tutorial-based introduction to Stata, with examples that use easily accessible household survey data from Bangladesh, see Appendixes 1 and 2 of Haughton and Khandker (2009).
- 2.
These computations adjust for sample stratification and clustering. The boxplots also adjust for sampling weights.
References
Anscombe, F.J. 1973. Graphs in Statistical Analysis. American Statistician 27:17–21.
Bales, Sarah. 1999. Determinants of low birth weights. In Health and wealth in Vietnam, ed. D. Haughton, J. Haughton, S. Bales, K. Chuyen, and N. Nga. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Cleveland, W.S. 1993. Visualizing data. Summit: Hobart Press.
Economist Intelligence Unit. 2005. Vietnam: Country Profile. London.
Ellenberg, Jonas. 2000. Statisticians’ significance. Journal of the American Statistical Association 95(449): 1–8.
Freedman, David, and Persi Diaconis. 1981. On the histogram as a density estimator: L2 theory. Probability Theory and Related Fields 57(4): 453–476.
Gelman, A., C. Pasarica, and R. Dodhia. 2002. Let’s practice what we preach: Turning tables into graphs. The American Statistician 56(2): 121–130.
Haughton, Jonathan. 2000. Ten puzzles and surprises: Economic and social change in Vietnam, 1993–1998. Comparative Economic Studies 17(4): 67–92.
Haughton, J., and S. Khandker. 2009. Handbook on poverty and inequality. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Haughton, D., J. Haughton, and A. Mbaye. 2010. The informal sector, business climate and firm growth: WAEMU countries in comparative perspective, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar.
Hintze, J., and R.D. Nelson. 1998. Violin plots: A box plot-density trace synergism. The American Statistician 52: 181–184.
Rousseeuw, P., I. Ruts, and J. Tukey. 1999. The bagplot: A bivariate boxplot. The American Statistician 53: 382–387.
Silverman, B. 1986. Density estimation for statistics and data analysis. London: Chapman and Hall.
Skaletsky, M., O. Soremekun, and R. Galliers. 2011. The changing – and unchanging – face of the digital divide: An application of Kohonen Self Organizing Maps, unpublished, Bentley University, Waltham, MA.
Stata Corporation. 2010. The kdensity command. Stata manual for release 11: 816–825.
Tufte, E. 2001. The visual display of quantitative information, 2nd ed. Cheshire: Graphics Press.
Wand, M.P. 1997. Data-based choice of histogram bin width. The American Statistician 51: 59–64.
Wang, C., and M. Meisner. 2010. Dynamic data visualization. Case Studies in Business, Industry and Government Statistics 4(1): 9–22.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Haughton, D., Haughton, J. (2011). Graphical Methods. In: Living Standards Analytics. Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0385-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0385-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-0384-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-0385-2
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)