Part of a whole
Diverging stacked bar chart
Positions ordered response components around a shared centre, often for survey comparisons.
- Chart
- Composition
- Deviation
What it answers
How do positive and negative responses balance?
- Shape
- Stacked segments around a centre
- What it shows
- Balance of favourable and unfavourable responses.
Example
The question
How did staff rate each part of the new system?
Staff survey, share of answers by item
Illustrative data. It belongs to no company.
When to use it
Use it when
Comparing several Likert-style survey items.
Avoid it when
Unordered components or unclear neutral/denominator rules.
How to read it
Read ordered response categories on each side of the centre; inspect neutral placement.
Note
State how neutral responses are positioned.
The data you need
- Layout
- Long table
- Fields
- Item: text; Response: ordered category; Count or Share: nonnegative number
- One row is
- One response-level count or share for an item. What is the grain?
- Rules
- Specify response order, shared denominator and neutral-centre rule. Aggregate individual responses first if necessary.
- Optional
- Raw alternative: RespondentID,Item,Response. Define reverse-coded questions.
- Preparation
- Validate the input grain and missing values. Specify response order, shared denominator and neutral-centre rule. Aggregate individual responses first if necessary.
- Units
- Counts or percentages of eligible respondents per item. Declare whether neutral/missing responses are in the denominator.
Worked example
Data disagree=12, neutral=8, agree=30, total=50. Shares are 24%,16%,60%. Centre neutral consistently; favourable responses dominate.
| Item | Response | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Service | Disagree | 12 |
| Service | Neutral | 8 |
| Service | Agree | 30 |