5. Visualizing data

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” and in a world in which journal articles have word count limits, figures and graphs are priceless. They are also an incredibly powerful way to examine your data because it can often illuminate patterns you may not be able to see through a table.

Remember: it is incredibly important to always visualize your data! You never know what descriptive statistics may be hiding.

Here’s a video walking through why it’s so important to look at your data.

jamovi has some plots built into its platform, both under the Plots drop-down menu in the Descriptives analysis and as options for many of the inferential statistical analyses.

We’ll learn more about how to choose and conduct better data visualizations later, but for now here are some recommended visualizations depending on what you are trying to do. Note that we will do most of our visualizations in jamovi, but we may also learn how to visualize data via Excel. There are also excellent LinkedIn Learning courses on data visualization in Excel and other tools that I strongly recommend; they are free for you if you are a UW-Stout student.