Blog link: https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/035/
Introduction:
This visualization represents the comparative analysis of percentage of people of different race groups, without a high school education among native and foreign born Americans spread across various regions in USA.
Evaluating Bar-graphs as a tool for visualization:
- Bar-graphs is an excellent tool for showcasing the comparison among various segments. One thing I liked about this chart is its simplicity. It showcases the comparison across four segments that are nativity, gender, region and ethnicity without making the visualization cluttered and complex.
- The general quality of bar-graphs is that are accessible to a wide audience and they permit visual guidance on accuracy and reasonableness of calculations. However, in this visualization, there are certain weaknesses, which makes it difficult for its audience to interpret. There is no information provided about how the percentages of population are calculated.
- Use of different colors makes trends easier to highlight and interpret, however purple and blue both have lighter shades of their color and a person having a color blindness could easily misunderstood the categories.
- It is difficult to see the differences because there are too many graphs plotted. It is difficult to interpret the difference between the two far away groups.
- One of the most basic requirement missing in this visualization is the absence of timeframe for which the bar-graphs are plotted. I am unable to figure out whether the graph plot is a snapshot of these statistics on a particular time or aggregated/averaged over a period of time. The visualization completely misses the timeframe information.
Moving on to the critical analysis….
- Goal: This visualization clearly displays that foreign-born population irrespective of gender and ethnicity, lags behind native Americans by a substantial margin in attaining high school education. However, various sources [1] suggest that the percentage of foreign population in attaining college level education is higher than the corresponding percentage in native Americans and that Immigrants in USA are considered to play a vital role in its economic success. It is very enlightening for the viewers to know that despite this, the foreign-born Americans lag behind in the high school education.
- Audience: I am unable to find the target audience for this visualization. This visualization may not be sufficient to help any category of audience (native or foreign born) because it fails to expose key assumptions, causes, and impact on the life of people who either have attended the high school or have not attended the high school. For example, the high percent of non-high school diploma may be because of poor living standard or other social conditions specific to the region/race. The visualization does not provide any insight about these details. Therefore, I would not categorize it as insightful because it lacks details.
- Claim: This visualization does not present any claim either about the Native Americans vs foreign born, about their work-life success or their earnings. As there is no explicit claim, there could not be any warrant backing the claim.
- Rebuttal: As there is no explicit claim or arguments, one cannot throw any counter arguments. The only evident information appearing from the graphs is that the overall high school attendees in native born America is much higher than foreign born. If the designer wants to conclude from the above information and present an argument that natives are more successful then I can come up with counter arguments against it. First, there is no information about the population in the data source for this visualization. We don’t know the proportion of population of native Americans and immigrants at the point of time when this graph was plotted. Secondly, the number of immigrants in USA is increasing at a very rapid rate as compared to the population of native born Americans. So, I cannot categorize this as either insightful or convincing.
- Key performance indicator: There are four segments taken into the consideration in this chart that are nativity, gender, region, and ethnicity. But this does not provide any information about the set of quantifiable measures that can be used to gauge of any indicator’s performance over time. For example, the performance of any ethnicity group such as Hispanics or Blacks over time. Is the percentage of population without any education is widespread among particular group of ethnicity or region.
- No information about any particular location in a region: The visualization provides statistics at the level of geographical regions (south, mid-west, northeast and west), which is at a very high level. To get a better insight, the numbers should have been provided for state/county levels. The reason is the population of certain races may be concentrated in few states/counties (of a region) and the high percent of non high school diploma people for those races may be because of less number of schools in those areas or some other factors. Having statistics at a more geographically granular level (i.e., states/counties) would un-earth such details and make statistics less prone to loosing such fine details due to adding/averaging the numbers across states/counties of a region.
What could have been done better:
- Firstly, using stacked bar graphs would have reduced the number of graphs. The most striking difference is seen between native and foreign-born Americans. So, the nativity dimension can be clubbed using stacked bar graphs to reduce the number of bar graphs from sixteen to eight as illustrated here. This would ease the comparison of percentages across native and foreign-born Americans as both statistics are on the same bar now. Reduction of graphs would help users to make sense of the information.
- Bubble chart could have been used to clearly showcase the %age of population in males and females in both the categories. This would help to identify if any particular region and ethnicity is most prone to less education.
- Use of multiple sources of data: To come upon certain critical comparisons, data should be captured from multiple sources, this increases the authenticity of the visualization designed.
- Aesthetics could have been made better by using very different colors rather than similar shades.
You can view my some more redesigns here:
https://us-east-1.online.tableau.com/#/site/magarwalscuedu/workbooks/57227/views
References:
- http://www.breitbart.com/education/2016/03/31/census-foreign-born-adults-less-likely-high-school-degree-native-born-likely-advanced-degree/