Recently, I’ve taken part in a discussion about how to present numbers to convey a message about true people stories.
We often forget that these are not only numbers. Each number represents a human being, his/her tragedy and tragedy of her/his relatives.
Statistics often show numbers, % of populations, rises, falls and trends. There is a huge challenge and effort to depict context and tell the story behind datasets. Especially, when we try to depict in numbers the phenomenon such as #COVID-19. We have to remember that “confirmed cases” are real people, who are diagnosed with coronavirus. A number of deaths is a number of people who lost their lives because of this disease.
Daily, we are exposed to numerous statistics in media, workplaces, schools. They describe current situations, accidents, local and global events like car accidents, infants mortality or unemployment. Most of them are expressed as a ratio or percentage. These formats are not intuitive and for most people are hard to interpret. However, there are some methods, which connect numbers with people. Maybe not with individuals, but with countable human beings, with whom we can empathize.
A good example is the unemployment rate, which is one of the most important economic indicators. In the governmental statistics, unemployment is presented as a ratio of employees to all people who can work.
An unemployment rate expressed as a percentage does not cause any emotions among most of us. Most of us understand what see, but … it is nothing personal. Percentages are abstract objects. It is about closer indefinite part of the population throughout the country.
As studies show, we can transform this message in a way to evoke people feelings and make them start to take a more human perspective. Instead of abstract 20%, we can present that 1 out of 5 people is unemployed. Each of us can count to five. Each of us can easily list five people. Behind this number, people’s faces may stand. In such a small group of people, our neighbour or our family member may be out of work. This is no longer an abstraction but a very real threat.
Convince Me with Data 