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When should a bar graph be used to display qualitative data?
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Figure 1: A bar graph showing the marital status of 100 individuals.
A bar graph should be used to display qualitative data that has been summarized in a frequency distribution.1
In this format, the categories of the qualitative variable are placed along the horizontal axis, and the height of each corresponding bar is constructed to be proportional to the number of data values within that specific category. This method is distinct from a histogram, which is specifically used to represent quantitative data distributed across continuous intervals.12