Boxplot is broken, only showing one line

Question

so my data centres around different treatments and how they impact the day of germination. image of dodgy boxplot data

A while ago whilst making violin plots in R to show the distribution of when germination occurs according to treatment, I attempted to add a boxplot as a descriptive statistic and was met with only one line.

I contacted many people who simply had no idea what the issue was, I used this same data in another violin plot as part of a bigger data collection with more treatments including this one.

I moved on from this and found it odd, now when I have come to perform stats tests in SPSS, I have the same problem as imaged below. When I try a Mann Whitney U test I am told "cannot compute" due to not having solely two variables, when I try a Kruskal Wallis test I am met with the dodgy boxplot below and I am told pairwise comparisons cannot be done due to less than 3 test fields (i.e. 2).

I am at an absolute loss, I have tried rewriting the data out, copying data labels with 'stratified' 'strat' 's' etc and I have no idea where the problem could lie, if anyone could give me any guidance this would be really appreciated!

Thank you

Answer 1

The dependent variable in question appears to have only values 1, 2, and 3 in the Stratified group. If there is at least one case with a value of 1, at least one case with a value of 3, but most values at 2, then a box plot like you're seeing would be expected. In SPSS, run the EXAMINE procedure (Analyze>Descriptive Statistics>Explore in the menus), specifying the same dependent variable and grouping variable, and asking for percentiles. The box plots should match what you're getting, and in the percentiles table you should see that Tukey's hinges show the same value of 2 for the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles.

Tukey's hinges are the basis for the box and the line in box plots. The line is at the median or 50th percentile, and the upper and lower box edges are at the 25th and 75h percentiles, respectively. When all three coincide, you get just a line instead of a box.

There are two types of outlying values identified in box plots in SPSS. Points greater than 1.5 box lengths below or above the box edges are outliers, marked with circles, and points greater than 3 box lengths below or above the box edges are extremes, marked with asterisks. Since the box length here is 0, anything at other values is automatically an extreme.

Pairwise comparisons following a Kruskal-Wallis test are available only when there are at least three groups, since with only two groups the overall or omnibus test has already compared the two groups. I'm not sure what the issue was when trying to run a Mann-Whitney test.