Dot Plots

A Dot Plot is a graphical display of data using dots.

Example: Minutes To Eat Breakfast

A survey of "How long does it take you to eat breakfast?" has these results:

Minutes:	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
People:	6	2	3	5	2	5	0	0	2	3	7	4	1

Which means that 6 people take 0 minutes to eat breakfast (they probably had no breakfast!), 2 people say they only spend 1 minute having breakfast, and so on.

And here's the dot plot:

Stacked dot plot showing breakfast times from 0 to 12 minutes, with heights representing frequency.

You can create your own dot plots.

Another version (called a Cleveland Dot Plot) has just one dot for each data point. It also has a a scale on the side (useful for reading precise values) like this:

Example: (continued)

This has the same data as above:

Alternative dot plot with a vertical frequency scale showing single dots plotted at each count level.

But notice that we have numbers on the side so we can see what the dots mean.

Grouping

Example: Access to Electricity across the World

Some people don't have access to electricity (they live in remote or poorly served areas). A survey of many countries had these results:

Country	Access to Electricity (% of population)
Algeria	99.4
Angola	37.8
Argentina	97.2
Bahrain	99.4
Bangladesh	59.6
...	... and so on

But hang on! How do we make a dot plot of that? There might be only one "59.6" and one "37.8", and so on. Nearly all values will have just one dot.

The answer is to group the data (put it into "bins").

In this case let's try rounding every value to the nearest 10%:

Country	Access to Electricity (% of population, nearest 10%)
Algeria	100
Angola	40
Argentina	100
Bahrain	100
Bangladesh	60
...	... and so on

Now we count how many of each 10% grouping and these are the results:

Access to Electricity (% of population, nearest 10%)	Number of Countries
10	5
20	6
30	12
40	5
50	4
60	5
70	6
80	10
90	15
100	34

So there were 5 countries where only 10% of the people had access to electricity, 6 countries where 20% of the people had access to electricity, and so on

Here's the dot plot:

Grouped dot plot showing country counts for different percentages of electricity access in 10 percent intervals.
Countries by Percent of Population with Access to Electricity

And that's a good plot, it shows the data nicely.