Review of Visualizations in Federal Statistical Agency Publications

This is the third of a series of three papers, the first two provide comments and suggestions on the visualizations appearing in NCSES publications and provide alternative ways to display the data; the third is a survey of the visualizations in other federal government statistical agency publications.

This third paper is a survey of the visualizations in other federal government statistical agency publications. The majority of federal statistical agency visualizations are a form of bar chart (simple, stacked, multi-set), pie chart, or line graph. The exceptions are visualizations in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Census documents. Only those visualizations or combinations of visualizations that are not currently used in NCSES documents are included in this report. The report includes examples of these visualizations using NCSES data; these visualizations are outlined in orange for emphasis.

All three papers are organized by topic defined by the number of variables being displayed and the measurement level of the variables, or whether the visualization is geospatial, displays a difference between two variables, or has time on the horizontal axis. Within a topic area, the figures outlined in orange are from NCSES publications and the figures outlined in grey provide an alternative way to display the same data. The alternative visualizations presented in the paper have not been endorsed or approved by NCSES for use in NCSES publications.

Topics
1. Graphs with 1-categorical variable
2. Graphs with 2-categorical variables
3. Graphs with >= 3-categorical variables
4. Graphs with Time on the Horizontal Axis
5. Graphs that Display a Difference
6. Geospatial Graphs