Comparing science engagement activities in Australia

Read more about this project here.

There are two interactive ways to view key aspects of the reported activities – bubbles and the map.

The bubbles allow you to compare pairs of key categories selected from the national survey about science engagement activities. The map provides a range of search filters for you to locate where different types of individual activities are delivered or managed.

A quick guide to using the bubbles:

  1. When the page first appears you’ll see four blue disks, called outer bubbles. These initial bubbles show the four possible answers to the Outcome category from the top row.
  2. Move your cursor over a bubble to get a text pop-up about what the bubble represents.
  3. The sizes of these bubbles imply the relative frequency of the possible answers within a category.
  4. Click on different categories in the top row to see other sets of outer bubbles. The number of bubbles ranges from four to 28.
  5. Click on a category in the bottom row and coloured inner bubbles appear. This provides a visual comparison of the frequency of answers for different pairs of categories.
  6. Each of the inner bubbles also has a text pop-up. For some categories a colourless inner bubble within a black circle appears. This is the other bubble and it lists less frequent answers.
  7. The total of the percentages for a set of bubbles well exceeds 100%. This is because each category can have multiple answers.
  8. The colour of inner bubbles helps to identify their answer within the outer bubbles.

More about the bubbles:

Comparing categories: The categories are in three broad groupings; those that relate to an attribute of the Activity, those which characterise the type of Engagement, and those about the Evaluation of the activity.

Multiple choices: Some categories, such as Outcomes, represent survey questions with only a few possible choices of answer. Others, such as Tools, represent questions with up to 28 choices of answer. A science engagement activity could have multiple answers for each category.

Two rows: The two rows at the top of the page contain the same key categories. A category selected from the top row defines the outer bubbles. Picking a category from the lower row produces the coloured inner bubbles. If you want to swap the categories of the outer and inner bubbles you need to click on a different category from either row, and then reselect the categories you want to compare.

Outer and inner bubbles: Selecting different pairs of categories from the two rows allows you to quickly look for patterns in the data set.

Other bubbles: when there are more than ten possible inner bubbles, nine coloured bubbles and one colourless bubble surrounded by a black circle, called the other bubble, will be shown. Move the cursor over the other bubble to pop-up a listing of less frequent answers in a category.

Resetting the page: To reset the bubble visualisations, refresh the webpage or switch to the map view and then go back to the bubble page. This will bring up the outer bubbles of the Outcome category.

Read more about this project here.

Leave a Reply