A behind-the-scenes blog about research methods at Pew Research Center. For our latest findings, visit pewresearch.org. Every survey finding published by Pew Research ...

Most people have decades of experience looking at graphs. We see them in television reports, books, magazines, presentations at work, and on the stock market apps on our phones. On the surface, ...

Bar graphs seem like one of the simplest ways to represent data. Many people assume that the longer the bar, the bigger the number it represents. Sometimes bar graphs represent an average not a total ...

Relative superiority is rarely all that we want to know from data visualization. Often, we want to know how variable a measure, population, or distribution is. And variability cannot be gleaned from ...