Lesson 4: Displaying Public Health Data

Overview

Imagine that you work in a county or state health department. The department must prepare an annual summary of the individual surveillance reports and other public health data from the year that just ended. This summary needs to display trends and patterns in a concise and understandable manner. You have been selected to prepare this annual summary. What tools might you use to organize and display the data?

Most annual reports use a combination of tables, graphs, and charts to summarize and display data clearly and effectively. Tables and graphs can be used to summarize a few dozen records or a few million. They are used every day by epidemiologists to summarize and better understand the data they or others have collected. They can demonstrate distributions, trends, and relationships in the data that are not apparent from looking at individual records. Thus, tables and graphs are critical tools for descriptive and analytic epidemiology. In addition, remembering the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, you can use tables and graphs to communicate epidemiologic findings to others efficiently and effectively. This lesson covers tabular and graphic techniques for data display; interpretation was covered in Lessons 2 and 3.

Objectives

Major Sections