Stem and Leaf Displays
by David M. Lane
Prerequisites
• Chapter 1: Distributions
Learning Objectives
- Create and interpret basic stem and leaf displays
- Create and interpret back-to-back stem and leaf displays
- Judge whether a stem and leaf display is appropriate for a given data set
A stem and leaf display is a graphical method of displaying data. It is particularly useful when your data are not too numerous. In this section, we will explain how to construct and interpret this kind of graph.
As usual, we will start with an example. Consider Table 1 that shows the number of touchdown passes (TD passes) thrown by each of the 31 teams in the National Football League in the 2000 season.
Table 1. Number of touchdown passes.
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A stem and leaf display of the data is shown in Figure 1. The left portion of Figure 1 contains the stems. They are the numbers 3, 2, 1, and 0, arranged as a column to the left of the bars. Think of these numbers as 10’s digits. A stem of 3, for example, can be used to represent the 10’s digit in any of the numbers from 30 to 39. The numbers to the right of the bar are leaves, and they represent the 1’s digits. Every leaf in the graph therefore stands for the result of adding the leaf to 10 times its stem.
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