SPEAKING GRAPHICALLY - AN INTRODUCTION TO SOME NEWER GRAPHING TECHNIQUES

The vast majority of graphs appearing in the psychiatric literature co nsist of the traditional line graphs, histograms, and bar charts. Over the past decade, new graphing techniques have appeared which make the data easier to read and which present much more information than simp ly group means and confidence intervals. These methods include horizon tal bar charts, dot charts, stem-and-leaf plots, box plots, and notche d box plots. This paper describes these new techniques, as well as old er ones, such as smoothing, and warns against using some of the option s found in graphics programs: 3-dimensional (3-D) graphs, stacked grap hs, and pie charts.