A hilariously overinflated pie chart

At the Childcare.co.uk web site there was an article on June 3, 2019 titled Parents get MORE STRESSED about an UNTIDY HOME than anything else (including the health of their children and lack of sleep). It reported results in percent from asking ~4000 members of that community what their stress triggers were. But the text instead claimed to have asked about the biggest stress trigger or fear:

“Only 16% of parents stated that their biggest fear was losing their child in a crowd…”

Results were reported in the eight-slice pie chart shown above (to which I have added a syringe to indicate overinflation). That is because that chart is overinflated to a total of 273.6%. The two largest slices for Untidiness of house (60.8%) and Lack of sleep (55.2%) add to 116% - while all the slices should only add to 100%. Look at the angle of slightly less than ninety degrees covered by the dark green slice for Untidiness of house. It really represents 22.2%, which is what you get when you divide 60.8 % by 2.73. People had reported on several triggers rather than just their biggest trigger.

Back on December 22, 2013 I had blogged about ‘tis the season for pies and artistic charts about them, and discussed another pie chart that totaled to an absurd  271%. This one is even worse.

Those Childcare results should have instead been reported via a horizontal bar chart, as is shown above. The syringe image came from the Database Center for Life Science at Wikimedia Commons.