t-test

Understanding t-tests, ANOVA, and MANOVA

Imagine you love baking cookies and invite your friends over for a cookie party. You want to know how many cookies you should make so you ask your friends about how many cookies they think they will each eat. They respond:

  • Francesca: 5 cookies
  • Sydney: 3 cookies
  • Noelle: 1 cookie
  • James: 7 cookies
  • Brooke: 2 cookies

We take these numbers and add all of them together to estimate that about 18 cookies will be eaten in total at our party.

Nonparametric and Parametric Power: Comparing the Wilcoxon Test and the t-test

From 2004 to 2008, a series of four brief, disagreeing papers in the journal Medical Education took up the question of whether and when it’s appropriate to analyze data from Likert scales (i.e., integers reflecting degrees of agreement with statements) with parametric or nonparametric statistical methods.