First Visual Designs
In this work, we used the ESS dataset to analyze the relation between trust and well-being for European countries.
Our survey dataset contains questions regarding trust to different entities such as European Parliament, police, politicians, country’s parliament, political parties, and United Nations; therefore we considered analyzing them individually and also summarized. Well-being could also be measured in different aspects such as happiness, optimism, safety, etc.
We structured our brainstorming, insights, and analysis on the miro board, which was divided into 3 sections: diverge, emerge, and converge.
DIVERGE
In this first step, we created raw material by drawing sketches to raise ideas for visualizing the relation between trust and well-being. We think of seeing the pattern between these features such as less happy people tend to trust less or vice versa.
First of all, we proposed sketch-1 (HSK-45), which we draw 20 points in total, 10 for trust to police and 10 for happiness. Each point can be connected to 10 points from the other feature, for instance, level-1 of trust to police can be connected to 10 level-points of happiness. This sketch seems to be a similar one compared to the heatmap, however, points can be anywhere in the plot. This provides flexibility and similarity between within-feature levels.
Secondly, we need to quantify these relationships. Visualization gives a sense of pattern but numbers may show more in-depth knowledge. To do so, we have a box that is divided into 10 different levels by 9 vertical lines in sketch 2 (HSK-17). Each vertical region shows the level of trust to the police. At each level, we divide respondents based on their happiness level by their percentage. In the end, we can compare the percentages within any trust-level.
We also thought of visualizing the trust quantified for each country as shown in sketch 3 (HSK-18).
Due to the multi aspects of well-being, we tried to visualize their quantities with a radar plot, filtering by each country as in Sketch 4.
Emerge
In the emerging step, we have tried to combine some initial sketches that we can develop further with two objectives:
- Dynamic interpretation
- Interactive visualisations.
The following sketches are some interesting combinations:
The first combination aims at presenting the distribution between dimensions (i.e., Trust in Europe — Happiness of citizens — Optimism). By three elements, the idea can be visualized as:
- Hive plot: connects different levels of trust to levels of well-being dimensions (happiness and optimism).
- Bar chart: provides detailed distribution data of individual respondents when the users hover on any line between two features of the hive plot. Colors can be used to demonstrate the well-being levels corresponding to each trust level.
- Map: facilitates the user interaction (UI) when users want to investigate insights into any country.
The second combination is expected to present multiple dimensions of well-being in different countries. In the data preparation (EFA), we have explored 6 dimensions of well-being. We visualize the comparison between countries from different European regions (i.e., Denmark for Northern Europe, Germany for Western Europe, etc.).
- Bar chart surrounding a Europe map: facilitates the user interaction (UI) when users want to have general well-being of any country in comparison to the whole Europe. The well-being of the selected country can be highlighted and others can be faded to boost the contrast.
- Radar chart: presents levels of 6 well-being features of the selected countries. Colors can demonstrate the performance of each country. That can leverage the country-to-country comparison in every perspective of the concept.
The third interesting combination elaborates our ambition to dig deeper into the relation between trust in institutions and well-being. Acknowledged that Trust dimension as an 11-point likert scale, we want to manipulate the ordinal nature to evaluate the dynamics of well-being (average values) at every level of trust.
- Trust bar: a UI function that users can slide from 0–10.
- Bar chart: contains well-being values of each country which can give the dynamics at the country level.
- Line chart: draws (a motion) the trends of well-being when users slide on the Trust bar. We expect to merge the line chart and the bar chart.
Converge
In the last section, we carefully select the ideas and sketches that go for further visualization.
We use an interactive hive plot to visualize the distribution of respondents per trust for well-being features (for instance, happiness and optimism). When hovered, each line may show a stacked barplot with different levels for further details.
In the next steps, we will start implementing the plots on Vega Javascript framework, which provides building blocks for a wide range of data visualization possibilities.
During this process of implementation, new ideas and insights may come up for the converge section, as well as new plots.
