Video: Comparing Groups

The most useful insights from data come from spotting an important change. This time we’ll use country level data from Gapminder to explore the changes in the population demographics for countries around the world.

[Illustrated transcript (pdf)]

After you’ve watched these videos, you should be able to answer these questions:

• When we compared children per woman, between regions, how many variables were involved and what were they?
• What are the main things we look for when comparing groups using dot plots?
• Why, as a way of transmitting group-comparison information, is simply quoting group averages often misleading?
• What is the natural way of measuring the extent of a shift?
• When looking at the extent of a difference between group centres, what else should we be relating that to when trying to gauge how important a change is?
• When do we pay attention to changes in spread or variability?
• How should we measure a “change” in spreads?
• When do we pay attention to changes in shape?
• What can we do with sets of dot plots to explore the effect of another variable?