Lab 3: Describing and Visualizing Data

Instructions

Can’t believe we’re at Lab #3! Keep it going! We are going to continue to practice importing data and making a reproducible workflow. In this lab, you will be expanding the types of plots you are able to use.

We will be using data from the Bechdel test, a measure of the representation of women in fiction. You will be asked to do some Exploratory Data Analysis.

Here are the things that you will need for this lab:

When you are finished, click the Knit button to turn your work into an HTML document. You will submit both this .Rmd file and the 🧶knitted .html file.

Scenario and Goal

In this lab, you will act as a data journalist exploring a dataset on movies. We will use the data from the FiveThirtyEight story “The Dollar-And-Cents Case Against Hollywood’s Exclusion of Women.”

This analysis is about the Bechdel test, a measure of the representation of women in fiction.

Your goal is to import, describe, and visualize this data to understand the characteristics of movies in the dataset and see if there are relationships between a movie’s budget, its box office gross, and its Bechdel Test rating. This is the critical first step in any analysis, known as Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA).

Variables of Interest

  • year: The year of movie release

  • clean_test: Bechdel test result:

    • ok = passes test

    • dubious

    • men = women only talk about men

    • notalk = women don’t talk to each other

    • nowomen = fewer than two women

  • binary: Bechdel Test PASS vs FAIL binary

  • budget_2013: Total movie budget

Exercises

Exercise 1: Importing and Inspecting

First, you need to set up your RMarkdown to get it ready for importing the data and using the appropriate libraries. Be sure to have all libraries listed here in the first code chunk along with importing the data. I should not see any lines that say install.packages().

I will attempt to reproduce your output in my own computer, so be sure that your code is reproducible.

Question 1: Look at the output from your overview. How many total movies are in this database? And what year is the latest movie?

Your Answer:

Question 2: Calculate the Average budget of the whole dataset. Then, calculate the average for only movies in the year 2000.

Your Answer:

Exercise 2: Grouped Descriptive Statistics

Averages for the whole dataset are useful, but we are often more interested in comparing averages between groups. Let’s see if the average budget differs for movies that pass the Bechdel Test versus those that fail. The binary variable tells us this (“PASS” or “FAIL”).

Question 3: Based on your summary table, do movies that pass or fail the Bechdel test have a higher average (mean) budget?

Your Answer:

Exercise 3: Visualizing a Distribution (Histogram)

Let’s visualize the distribution of domestic gross earnings (adjusted for 2013) across all the movies.

Question 4: Describe the shape of the distribution you see in the histogram. Is it symmetric (like a bell curve), or is it skewed in one direction? Where do most movies’ earnings seem to be clustered?

Your Answer:

Exercise 4: Examining the Bechdel Test distribution

Now we want to see how many movies fall into each of the Bechdel categories. Generate a barplot of the clean_test variable to see what the distribution of the test is.

Then choose a year in the dataset, create a similar plot (but only for that year). Therefore you should have 2 plots below:

Question 5: Examine both charts and describe the similarities and differences that you are noticing.

Answer:

Exercise 5: Comparing Groups with a Boxplot

Now let’s visually compare the inflation-adjusted international gross (intgross_2013) for movies that pass the Bechdel test versus those that fail. A boxplot is an excellent way to see differences in the median and spread between groups.

Question 6: Look at the boxplot. The thick horizontal line in the middle of each box represents the median. Does there appear to be a large difference in the median domestic gross between movies that pass and fail the test?

Your Answer:

End of Lab 3. You’ve now practiced exploratory data analysis! It is always important to visualize your data to get a good sense of what you are working with. Don’t forget to Knit! 🧶