Participants were asked if overall, they consider the internet to be a good or bad thing for society. I am curious if the distribution of ages varies by response. I would predict that older participants are more likely to say that the internet is a bad thing for society rather than than a good thing.
For the first iteration of this plot, I used ggridges to visualize the age distribution for each of the possible responses.
From this first plot, it looks like there may be some differences in response by age but it is difficult to see what the pattern might be. I was curious to know how many respondants were in each category. In the table below you can see that only 10 participants refused to answer. This is likely not enough to represent the population well, so I will remove it from future plots.
| response_category | response_count |
|---|---|
| Bad Thing | 294 |
| Don’t Know | 72 |
| Good Thing | 1338 |
| Refused to Answer | 10 |
| Some of Both | 288 |
For the second interation of this plot, I put the reponse categories in an order that was more interpretable to better visualize patterns in the data. Additonally, I chose a larger bandwith to show a clearer peak for each distribution. Finally, I cleaned up titles and axes to help orient the reader.
At this point, our plot would be pretty interpretable to any scientific audience that was familiar with denisity distributions. However, to make this plot more approachable for a general audience, it would be helpful to have a reference point for comparing response groups. For the final interation of the plot, I added a line and text at the highest density point for each response category.
From the final plot we can see that older participants were only slightly more likely to say that the internet has had at least some bad influence rather than being completely a good thing. However, there is a large skew towards older participants responding that they don’t know if the internet has been mostly good or bad. This may indicate that younger people have more definitive beliefs about the impact of the internet.