So I re-ordered each categorical variable from our Data Clubs database on teens and technology to go from least to most when such an ordering makes sense.  For example, one survey question asks about how often teens use the internet and their responses range from seldom, to several times a month, to weekly, to several times a week, to daily, to several times a day, to nearly constantly.  I placed variables like this in graphs and re-ordered the responses so that they would go from least often to most often.  Then I re-saved my database.

Later, when returning to the database and dropping variables like this on the X axis, everything is great.  The lowest value (e.g., “seldom”) is closest to the origin and the highest value (e.g., “constant”) is further from the origin.  However, if I drop the same variable on the Y axis, the ordering is reversed, with the highest value closer to the origin and the lowest value further away from the origin.  The order is right, but it just goes in the wrong direction.

If the variable is numeric this does not happen. Age, for example, goes from lower to higher as expected whether you drop it on the X or Y axis.  Lowest values are always closer to the origin with the numeric data.

Some variables can be treated as categorical or numeric.  For example, there is a survey question about number followers on Instagram. As a default the variable was treated as categorical because it includes the response, “not sure”, but it also includes numeric values.  When this variable is dropped on the Y axis and treated as categorical, the responses go from highest to lowest starting at the origin, but if treated as numeric, they go in the reverse direction, from lowest to highest, starting at the origin.

I’m not sure why the Y axis shifts the direction of the the order of values depending on whether a variable is treated as categorical versus numeric. It makes the graphs with categorical data that has some intuitive directionality hard to read. The responses are ordered correctly, but they reverse the direction that I want. Am I doing something wrong?  Is there a way to work around this?