Very good post. I’m still thinking about the loss aversion issue. Looking at your’s and Derek’s post shows me that each of us has focused on different questions, leading to different charts.

As I commented on Derek’s blog, it’s like a photographer who uses different lenses to shoot a scene. While the scene doesn’t change, the view of the scene does.

While some scene views (photos or charts for us) may be more interesting – pleasing than others, each has a role to play in understanding the actual scene that the photographer shot.

Chart type selection is a very important topic. Jorge’s income data provides a good example of the role of question to chart type.

I will try to synthesize Derek’s, yours and my charts and show how they address different questions about the same data. Since a lot of readers work with time series data, it would be nice to put together some time series chart type guidelines that help sort out potential questions and corresponding chart types.

Kelly

I had a second look on the scale and think the first version with the -15%- 15% scale is right. This way all charts scales span from min to max 30%, and a 5% change has the same height in all charts.

Andreas

Thanks for pointing out the problem with the common scale.
I fixed that in the blog post.

Thanks,

Andreas

You also need to be careful about labelling the axis on the final graph – the values need to be interpreted as differences of percentages, not percentages themselves. i.e. the number of people in the >$100 bracket did not increase by 15%.