Lesson 10: Using Data Displays to Find Associations

Let’s use data displays to find associations.

10.1: Sports and Musical Instruments

For a survey, students in a class answered these questions:

  • Do you play a sport?
  • Do you play a musical instrument?

  1. Here is a two-way table that gives some results from the survey. Complete the table, assuming that all students answered both questions.

      plays instrument does not play instrument total
    plays sport 5   16
    does not play sport      
    total   15 25

  2. To the nearest percentage point, what percentage of students who play a sport don’t play a musical instrument?

  3. To the nearest percentage point, what percentage of students who don’t play a sport also don’t play a musical instrument?

10.2: Sports and Music Association

Your teacher will give you a two-way table with information about the number of people in your class who play sports or musical instruments.

  1. Complete this table to make a two-way table for the data from earlier. The table will show relative frequencies by row.

      plays instrument does not play instrument row total
    plays sport     100%
    does not play sport     100%

  2. Make a segmented bar graph for the table. Use one bar of the graph for each row of the table.

  3. Complete the table to make a two-way table for the data from earlier. The table will show relative frequencies by column.

      plays instrument does not play instrument
    plays sport    
    does not play sport    
    column total 100% 100%

  4. Using the values in the table, make a segmented bar graph. Use one bar of the graph for each column of the table.

  5. Based on the two-way tables and segmented bar graphs, do you think there is an association between playing a sport and playing a musical instrument? Explain how you know.

10.3: Colored Erasers

An eraser factory has five machines. One machine makes the eraser shapes. Then each shape goes through the red machine, blue machine, yellow machine, or green machine to have a side colored.

The manager notices that an uncolored side of some erasers is flawed at the end of the process and wants to know which machine needs to be fixed: the shape machine or some of the color machines. The manager collected data on the number of flawed and unflawed erasers of each color.

  unflawed flawed total
red 285 15 300
blue 223 17 240
yellow 120 80 200
green 195 65 260
total 823 177 1000
  1. Work with a partner. Each of you should make one segmented bar graph for the data in the table. One segmented bar graph should have a bar for each row of the table. The other segmented bar graph should have one bar for each column of the table.
  2. Are the flawed erasers associated with certain colors? If so, which colors? Explain your reasoning.

Summary

In an earlier lesson, we looked at data on meditation and state of mind in athletes.


 

Is there an association between meditation and state of mind?

The bar graph shows that more athletes were calm than agitated among the group that meditated, and more athletes were agitated than calm among the group that did not. We can see the proportions of calm meditators and calm non-meditators from the segmented bar graph, which shows that about 66% of athletes who meditated were calm, whereas only about 27% of those who did not meditate were calm.

This does not necessarily mean that meditation causes calm; it could be the other way around, that calm athletes are more inclined to meditate. But it does suggest that there is an association between meditating and calmness.

Practice Problems ▶