VICTOR BISSONNETTE

Resources for the Learning and Teaching of Statistics and Behavioral Science

ILLUSTRATE STATISTICAL POWER

T Test for Independent Samples Solution

Example homework problem:

Twenty participants were given a list of 20 words to process. The 20 participants were
randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions. Half were instructed to count the
number of vowels in each word (shallow processing). Half were instructed to judge whether
the object described by each word would be useful if one were stranded on a desert island
(deep processing). A er a brief distractor task, all subjects were given a surprise free recall
task. The number of words correctly recalled was recorded for each subject. Here are the data:

Shallow Processing: 13 12 11 9 11 13 14 14 14 15

Deep Processing: 12 15 14 14 13 12 15 14 16 17

Did the instructions given to the participants significantly a ect their level of recall (alpha =
.05)?

The above problem involves an experiment with two treatment conditions. The goal of your
test is to see if there is significant mean di erence between the two treatment groups.

We will test for a significant mean di erence between the treatment groups with a t-test for
independent samples:

The numerator of this formula represents the mean di erence between the two treatment
groups. The denominator represents the standard error of the mean di erence. Within the
denominator, you will see that we will compute the pooled variance of our two treatment
groups:

Pooled variance is a weighted average of the variance estimates from our two groups. If you
need any help computing the mean and variance for each of your groups, look at the
documentation for the explore procedure. n refers to the sample size for each of our groups.
Compute test statistic. Compute the mean and variance for each group. You will find that:

Treatment Group: Shallow Deep

Mean: 12.600 14.200

Variance: 3.378 2.622

n: 10 10

Next, compute the pooled variance:

Finally, compute the value of the t statistic:

Conduct hypothesis test. Our t test will have df equal to the total of our sample sizes minus 2.
In our case, we have 10 participants in each group, so we would have df = n1 + n2 2 = 10 + 10
2 = 18.

Alpha was set at .05 and we will conduct a two- tailed test. When you consult your table of
critical values for t, you will find that if our obtained value of t is greater than 2.101, then we
would conclude that the mean di erence in recall between our two treatment conditions is
significant.

Since the obtained t (-2.07) is not greater in absolute value than the critical t (2.101), we would
conclude that there is not a significant di erence in recall between the two treatment groups.

E ect size. To describe the e ect size for this study, we will first compute r:

r is an estimate of the proportion of variance in our dependent variable that can be accounted
for by our manipulation of the independent variable. So, we could conclude that 19% of the
variance in recall was due to our manipulation of the encoding instructions.

However, many researchers prefer to use an unbiased e ect size estimate one that takes into
account the fact that we are doing small sample research. So, we will also compute Omega
Squared:

We would conclude that our manipulation of encoding instructions accounted for 14% of the
variance in memory performance.
Finally, we will compute Cohens D:

Cohens D standardizes the mean di erence in terms of standard deviation units. It is equal to
the mean di erence divided by the square root of the pooled variance. In our case, we would
conclude that there is a .92 standard deviation di erence between our treatment group means.

Confidence intervals. We will find the 95% confidence interval for the mean di erence. You
compute the limits of your CI with this formula:

Compute the standard error for the t test (0.7746), multiply this by the critical value for your t
test (2.101), and then add this to and subtract this from the mean di erence between your
groups (-1.60):

We can say with 95% certainty that the population mean di erence between our treatment
groups is between -3.23 and +0.03. Note that the
value 0.00 is within our 95% confidence interval for the mean di erence. We would conclude
from this that the mean di erence between our groups in our experiment was not statistically
significant.

If you would like a 99% confidence interval, just change the critical value of t in the formula.

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