BOX AND WHISKER PLOTS FOR GRAPHIC PRESENTATION OF AUDIOMETRIC RESULTSOF CONDUCTIVE HEARING-LOSS TREATMENT

Committee on Hearing and Equilibrium of the American Academy of Otolar yngology-Head and Neck Surgery has published guidelines for the report ing of audiometric results of middle ear interventions. It recommends the reporting of several audiometric variables by means of two summary parameters: means and standard deviation. This article advocates the use of other summary statistics, namely the median, quartiles, and ext remes, because they do not require a normal distribution of the audiom etric data and they are not sensitive to variations of the extreme val ues. On the basis of the exploratory data analysis, we propose a graph ic method to present the Committee's variables in terms of their summa ry statistics. This ''multiple box and whisker plot'' offers a detaile d and accurate overview of six variables in one graph.