Re: st: Graphical challenge from Gelman blog

["Airey, David C" <david.airey@vanderbilt.edu>]

.

The scales of the data across measures make using the raw data in your graph perfectly fine in my opinion.

I don't like their graphs, either the original or the newer ones. At least the original ring is reminiscent of a clock face, which I think must have been the intention. I don't think it suffers too badly from pie graph problems in the manner done.

If I were doing one measure at a time, the only thing I would do with your graph would be to order the countries from large to small. But this cannot be done in your graph, because country has a fixed X position across the different measures.

I guess when making a graph, from data that can be used to form multiple messages, is to ask which message is meant to be conveyed? I did not read Gelman's thread to know what that was.

> Over at Andrew Gelman's blog, there have been various attempts to
> improve on a graph first published by the The Economist. Most of the
> solutions use R. Some Stata users may want to try to see what they can
> do. Here are the threads:
> 
> 
> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2011/04/one_more_time-u.html
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2011/04/attractive_but.html
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2011/04/the_r_code_for.html
> 
> 
> Here's some code to read the data into Stata. The data are average
> hours per day spent in various activities in different countries.
> 
> clear
> input hours
>       4.2
>       3.2
>      11.1
>       1.3
>       2.2
>         2
>       3.9
>       3.2
>        10
>        .8
>       3.1
>       3.1
>       6.3
>       2.5
>       9.8
>        .9
>       2.2
>       2.4
>       4.4
>       3.1
>       9.8
>        .8
>       3.3
>       2.7
>       4.8
>         3
>       9.9
>        .7
>       3.1
>       2.4
>         4
>       3.4
>      10.5
>        .7
>       3.3
>       2.1
> end
> egen country = seq(), block(6)
> egen activity = seq(), to(6)
> label def country 1 France 2 Germany 3 Japan 4 Britain 5 USA 6 Turkey
> label def activity 1 Paid 2 Unpaid 3 "Eating, sleeping" 4 "Personal
> care" 5 Leisure 6 Other
> label val country country
> label val activity activity
> 
> and here's one suggestion on how to plot it. I can see the force of
> Andrew Gelman's suggestion to average across countries and plot
> residuals from that, but plotting the original data works as well for
> me.
> 
> tabplot ac co  [iw=hours], showval height(0.6) ytitle("") xtitle("")
> subtitle(hours/day)
> 
> Here -tabplot- is from SSC. (By the way, versions of -tabplot- not yet
> realised handle negative bars better than that on SSC, but there are
> no negative bars in the above.)
> 
> 

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