Process

After I decided on the topic that I was going to lie about, I went and looked through the suggested databases, but couldn't find anything I could use. So I turned to Google and stumbled upon the US census site. Unfortunately, though I wanted to compare same-sex couples along with the number of couples nationally, or just the number of people identifying as other than heterosexual, the census site did not provide information about couples or LGBTQIA+ folk in general. I went through a couple chart types before settling on the classic bar chart. Although the data is as correct as it can be coming from a census, the visualization is misleading since the chart is truncated, making it seem as though the number of same-sex couples is rising at a nearly exponential rate. Additionally, in 2008, the way the census question was worded changed, resulting a drop in the number of reported same-sex couples. The data prior to 2008 was omitted to create the illusion of a constant increase in the number of same-sex couples.