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Dealing with uncertainty: where to put ‘don’t know’ answer
#21: The Redesign of the Survey Data
Visualizing survey data can be tricky. Depending on the message you want to highlight, there are several ways to display data. You may place certain categories in different places. For example, you might show “Don’t know” answers separately. You may use different charts — panel bar chart, stacked bar chart, or diverging stacked chart. But in all those cases, you focus on agree/disagree dichotomy. And this is something The Economist chart failed to do.
In their article, Fake news is fooling more conservatives than liberals. Why?, The Economist team used the Gallup data to show in which countries people seem more vulnerable to misinformation. At the beginning of the pandemic, Gallup conducted a survey asking if people believe that a foreign power or other force is deliberately spreading coronavirus. Giving three possible options to choose from — “Yes”, “No”, and “Don’t know”. The authors used the stacked bar chart to visualize this data. So far, so good. But there are a few things that should’ve been done differently.
