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By Declan Fallon
For this article we will look at the annual ritual of New Year resolutions. YouGov[1] ran a poll which asked a series questions on participant’s outlook for 2017 and categorized their answers by different social groups. Unfortunately, the tabulated presentation of the data made it difficult to draw conclusions; so here, we will use Kx Dashboards to look for interesting aspects from the data.
The first thing is to get our data into a table with a simple filter option. This was outlined in our “Choices and more Choices” article. There are six core questions which we will define as a dropdown selection, tied to a view state parameter, with the results displayed inside a Data Grid
The questionnaire uses a number of different categories to breakdown the answers. In the PDF, this is spread over 22 pages but we can give an overall snapshot by:
For example, the Total column values were converted to a percentage with:
(Total%(max Total))*100
This could be repeated for each column
At this stage, we have something which looks like this:
The Data Grid still looks ‘too busy’ with the number of columns, particularly trying to discern what each column represents. Next, we will parse out the demographic elements with a second dropdown and tie the output to a set of Data Grids embedded in a Tab component.
Within our Tab component we now have a more defined focus on the demographic and their responses.
For example, in relation to the question around people’s financial well-being for the New Year, factored by marriage status, we can see the largest distribution in responses (from “get much better” to “get much worse”) coming from divorced couples, no doubt contingent on which side of the settlement award the responder fell on. Not surprisingly, the most negative in outlook were widowed as their outlook would no doubt be impacted by the loss of a partner; the radar chart for the widowed shows a marked skew in favor of “Get somewhat worse” on the financial front. The most optimistic were Civil Partners, the only group where “Get somewhat better” was the dominant answer. Married couples were also relatively positive. Separated people were the most neutral in their outlook; an attitude in sync with their married status limbo.
The radar chart is an ideal chart to use for this format of comparative analysis. We can add a Canvas chart to give us a representation of the distribution of answers; we will use a Box Plot to demonstrate this.
We do this so in the chart, users can select which of the provided data layers they want to view when making comparisons. For example, the range of answers given (from ‘Get much better’ to ‘Get much worse’), there was a wider distribution of answers when opinions on financial outlook for the year was asked compared to those of the participant’s love life.
At this stage, we have in place the core details of dashboard. We can finish it off by doing the following:
In the end, we converted our plain-tabled PDF into a more interactive dashboard
[1] Survey by YouGov plc market research
For more information on Kx Dashboards and its functionality please click on the links below.