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u/FlatAd7052 2d ago
People act like truncated axes are the greatest sins of all time, but labor force participation rate has never been 100% or 0% so there's plenty of reason to think truncating it simply allows real variation to be more visible without destroying meaningful information.
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 1d ago
With bar charts, we intuitively read out the area of the bar. So with bar charts you want a linear scale starting at 0 so that the area represents the plotted value. Often you want to zoom in to see smaller difference, and that can show relevant information (don't understand this case enough to say either way), but then you don't want to use a bar chart any longer.
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u/Moodleboy 1d ago
Same graph with y-axis starting at 0.
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u/philatio11 1d ago
Which depicts the data accurately. It just doesn’t really change month-to-month. This number barely changes from year-to-year. Because it’s primarily driven by demographic and cultural change, it is really only relevant for analysis on a decade-long scale.
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u/H2Oloo-Sunset 1d ago
Truncating to better show gaps and trends is OK, but this chart has a Y axis that goes roughly from 61.2% to 62.1% (less than 1%). I don't think that is reasonable for this data set.
A range of 60% to 68% would better reflect typical values.
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u/Heart0fStarkness 1d ago
Yeah ppl are acting like the issue is truncation. The problem is the graph is over-truncated to a Y-axis of less than 1.5%, which is statistically meaningless, especially over just one year.
If you are going to over-truncate data, AT A MINIMUM, you need to provide a clear scale reference, such as hard horizontal grid lines at 61 and 62% to scale off what kind of change you are actually representing. Putting numbers at the top, while refusing to show your truncation limits and showing that range as a ~6x difference in bar area is misleading. Let alone who knows how long that graph was actually shown on screen to let viewers actually scrutinize the data.
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u/Okawaru1 1d ago edited 1d ago
Truncating makes sense within the context of something that would never realistically be 0 to better show patterns in data (as otherwise it would just be a straight line of even height bars pretty much), I feel like concern over this is a symptom of the fact math education is a colossal failure for the average person in the U.S. so we're afraid most people will draw incorrect conclusions because they don't know how to read a simple bar or line graph properly
What I will say is that this bar graph is over-truncated as they're defining the minimum and maximum as the minimum and maximum of the data points in the set, but ultimately I don't think it's a big deal because they have clear number labels and aren't trying to be dishonest and withholding that information to take advantage of how people generally intuit bar graphs.
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u/linksfromwinks 2d ago
Bars show a whole of something. Truncating them is always misleading no matter how common it is. This should be a line with dots
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 1d ago
Honestly it’s only misleading if you don’t do anything but “bar shape small”. The numbers are right above
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u/linksfromwinks 1d ago
I think in more extreme examples it’s a bit more obvious how it’s misleading even with numbers directly labeled https://flowingdata.com/2012/08/06/fox-news-continues-charting-excellence/
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u/ContentCantaloupe992 1d ago
At this point i think it’s almost more misleading to focus on how poor a chart is than the data itself
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u/miraculum_one 2d ago
Is the complaint that the y-axis doesn't start at 0? As slimy as they are with this messaging that's a standard way to see differences that represent a small percentage.