Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/68012
100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Did not finish college Finished undergraduate study Correlation between massage use and educational level. compared to 77 percent of people who finished their undergraduate degree, and 79 percent of people who finished a graduate degree. They concluded that these 5 and 3 percentage point differences were not statistically significant, and that the usage in each group was effectively the same. However, that is not the message conveyed by Image 6. At first glance, it appears that people with no college degree are more than twice as likely to use massage, based on the relative size of the first column compared to the last two—a very significant visual difference that falsely implies there is a correlation between educational level and massage use. The reason? The vertical y-axis starts and ends at arbitrary points that do not take into account the large percentage that is the same among all the groups. In other words, the chart is just showing the tip of the iceberg to make it easier to see the differences between the groups. This is a legitimate presentation technique commonly used to emphasize differences in the media as well as in research, so you will have to use your judgment in many cases to fully understand what the chart is telling you. Where the boundary lies between legitimately showing differences and unreasonably exaggerating those differences is not always obvious. Image 7, by contrast, is an example of what the same data would look like on a chart where the y-axis is adjusted to show the entire range between 0 and 100 percent, giving a more accurate representation of effect size and showing that there really is very little difference overall between the groups. So when you see a graph that shows a visually large or small effect size, check it with the text, and check the units on both the x-axis and the y-axis to make sure that the visual effect is faithful to the results as they are reported in other places in the article. Finished graduate study NEXT STEPS IN INTERPRETATION These are three basic types of charts that you will find when reading massage research, as well as the types of questions they are intended to answer and the information needs they are intended to address. In the next article, we'll integrate the Results that we've been examining with the Discussion section. We'll see how the Discussion section ties together the just-the-facts emphasis of the Results section with imagination, and interpretation, and how—still tied to the empirical reality—researchers use this integration to derive meaning from those study results and to translate them into recommendations for real-life practice. practitioner and biomedical informatician in Seattle, Washington. She has practiced massage at the former Refugee Clinic at Harborview Medical Center and in private practice. In addition to teaching research methods in massage since 1996, she is the author of an upcoming book on research literacy in massage. Contact her at researching.massage@gmail.com with questions and comments. Ravensara S. Travillian is a massage visit massageandbodywork.com to access your digital magazine 135