Tightening the bond between the message and the visual: hello stats-cats

The editors of ASA's Amstat News certainly got my attention, in a recent article on school counselling. A research team asked two questions. The first was HOW ARE YOU FELINE?

Stats and cats. The pun got my attention and presumably also made others stop and wonder. The second question was HOW DO YOU REMEMBER FEELING while you were taking a college statistics course? Well, it's hard to imagine the average response to that question would be positive.

What also drew me to the article was this pair of charts:

Surely, ASA can do better. (I'm happy to volunteer my time!)

Rotate the chart, clean up the colors, remove the decimals, put the chart titles up top, etc.

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The above remedies fall into the V corner of my Trifecta checkup.

The key to fixing this chart is to tighten the bond between the message and the visual. This means working that green link between the Q and V corners.

This much became clear after reading the article. The following paragraphs are central to the research (bolding is mine):

Responses indicated the majority of school counselors recalled experiences of studying statistics in college that they described with words associated with more unpleasant affect (i.e., alarm, anger, distress, fear, misery, gloom, depression, sadness, and tiredness; n = 93; 66%). By contrast, a majority of counselors reported same-day (i.e., current) emotions that appeared to be associated with more pleasant affect (i.e., pleasure, happiness, excitement, astonishment, sleepiness, satisfaction, and calm; n = 123; 88%).

Both recalled emotive experiences and current emotional states appeared approximately balanced on dimensions of arousal: recalled experiences associated with lower arousal (i.e., pleasure, misery, gloom, depression, sadness, tiredness, sleepiness, satisfaction, and calm, n = 65, 46%); recalled experiences associated with higher arousal (i.e., happiness, excitement, astonishment, alarm, anger, distress, fear, n = 70, 50%); current emotions associated with lower arousal (n = 60, 43%); current experiences associated with higher arousal (i.e., n = 79, 56%).

These paragraphs convey two crucial pieces of information: the structure of the analysis, and its insights.

The two survey questions measure two states of experiences, described as current versus recalled. Then the individual affects (of which there were 16 plus an option of "other") are scored on two dimensions, pleasure and arousal. Each affect maps to high or low pleasure, and separately to high or low arousal.

The research insight is that current experience was noticably higher than recalled experience on the pleasure dimension but both experiences were similar on the arousal dimension.

Any visualization of this research must bring out this insight.

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Here is an attempt to illustrate those paragraphs:

The primary conclusion can be read from the four simple pie charts in the middle of the page. The color scheme shines light on which affects are coded as high or low for each dimension. For example, "distressed" is scored as showing low pleasure and high arousal.

A successful data visualization for this situation has to bring out the conclusion drawn at the aggregated level, while explaining the connection between individual affects and their aggregates.