Nursing Preparation Study Guide

Nursing Preparation Study Guide

When we look at our original histogram:

It has a bell shape to it. I drew in the bell shape, as students, you are probably familiar with bell curves for grading! Our histogram has equal distribution and a perfect bell. You can see that the polka-dot and checkered box, these values fall under the bell – remember they were the lowest frequencies observed in our data set. It is common to refer to these values as the 5% above the curve (polka-dot box) and the 5% below the curve (checkered box). It is important to note, that histograms can be skewed. Meaning there may not be a lower or upper 5% region under the bell curve. Think to a real life example, maybe you were in a class where 1 person received an 80 and everyone else had a grade below 80. The opposite I also true. What would the histogram look like if 1 person received an 80 and everyone else received a 90 or greater.

Bar graphs are visually similar to histograms, but bar graphs represent categorical data while histograms represent numerical data. Bar graphs represent the visual representation of collected data. The data are plotted on horizontal and vertical axis, and thereby, we have either horizontal or vertical bar graphs. Let us see how we can read each of these bar graphs.

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