CHOOSING A STATISTICAL TEST

LOUIS COHEN, LAWRENCE MANION & KEITH MORRISON

STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTER

How many samples? The types of data used Choosing the right statistic Assumptions of tests

INITIAL QUESTIONS IN SELECTING STATISTICS

What statistics do I need to answer my research questions? Are the data parametric or non-parametric? How many groups are there (e.g. two, three or more)? Are the groups related or independent? What kind of test do I need (e.g. a difference test, a correlation, factor analysis, regression)?

Scale of data Nominal

One sample

Two samples Independent Related McNemar

More than two samples Independent Related

Binomial

Fisher exact test

Chi-square Cochran Q (2) k-samples test

Ordinal

Chi-square (2) onesample test KolmogorovSmirnov one-sample test

Chi-square (2) twosamples test Mann-Whitney Wilcoxon U test matched pairs test
KolmogorovSmirnov test WaldWolfowitz Spearman rho Ordinal regression analysis Sign test

Kruskal-Wallis Friedman test test

Ordinal regression analysis

Scale of data

One sample

Two samples Independent Related

More than two samples Independent Related

Interval t-test and ratio

t-test

Pearson product moment correlation

t-test for One-way paired ANOVA samples Two-way ANOVA

Repeated measures ANOVA

Tukey hsd test Scheff test

THE TYPES OF DATA USED

Measures of association Nominal Tetrachoric correlation Point biserial correlation Phi coefficient Cramers V Chi-square McNemar Cochran Q Binomial test Ordinal Spearmans rho rank order correlation partial rank correlation Mann-Whitney U test t-test for two independent samples Kruskal-Wallis Wilcoxon matched pairs Friedman two-way analysis of variance t-test for two related samples One-way ANOVA Two-way ANOVA for more Interval and ratio Pearson productmoment correlation

Measures of difference

Wald-Wolfowitz test Tukey hsd test Kolmogorov-Smirnov Scheff test test

THE TYPES OF DATA USED

Nominal Measures of linear relationship between independent and dependent variables Identifying underlying factors, data reduction Ordinal Ordinal regression analysis Interval and ratio Linear regression Multiple regression

Factor analysis

Elementary linkage analysis

ASSUMPTIONS OF TESTS
Mean: Data are normally distributed, with no outliers Mode: There are few values, and few scores, occurring which have a similar frequency Median: There are many ordinal values

ASSUMPTIONS OF TESTS
Chi-square: Data are categorical (nominal) Randomly sampled population Mutually independent categories Discrete data(i.e. no decimal places between data points) 80% of all the cells in a crosstabulation contain 5 or more cases Kolmogorov-Smirnov: The underlying distribution is continuous Data are nominal

ASSUMPTIONS OF TESTS
t-test and Analysis of Variance:
Population is normally distributed Sample is selected randomly from the population Each case is independent of the other The groups to be compared are nominal, and the comparison is made using interval and ratio data The sets of data to be compared are normally distributed (the bell-shaped Gaussian curve of distribution) The sets of scores have approximately equal variances, or the square of the standard deviation is known The data are interval or ratio

ASSUMPTIONS OF TESTS
Wilcoxon test: The data are ordinal The samples are related Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis: The groups to be compared are nominal, and the comparison is made using ordinal data The populations from which the samples are drawn have similar distributions Samples are drawn randomly Samples are independent of each other

ASSUMPTIONS OF TESTS
Spearman correlation: The data are ordinal Pearson correlation: The data are interval and ratio

ASSUMPTIONS OF TESTS
Regression (simple and multiple): The data derive from a random or probability sample The data are interval or ratio (unless ordinal regression is used) Outliers are removed There is a linear relationship between the independent and dependent variables The dependent variable is normally distributed The residuals for the dependent variable (the differences between calculated and observed scores) are approximately normally distributed No collinearity (one independent variable is an exact or very close correlate of another)

ASSUMPTIONS OF TESTS
Factor analysis:

The data are interval or ratio The data are normally distributed Outliers have been removed The sample size should not be less than 100-150 persons There should be at least five cases for each variable The relationships between the variables should be linear The data must be capable of being factored