Bartlett's Test

One of the required conditions for the F-test of the analysis of variance is that the population variances are equal. Since this is about population variances, we want to use a hypothesis test to check this condition. Your text says you can informally look at the sample variances, but in practice, this would not be done, so we are going to look at one of the test options. It is similar to the F-test of variances that we introduced in Chapter 13 and used when deciding which whether to use the equal variances or the unequal variances t-test. There are several statistical tests available for multiple variances. We will introduce only one, Bartlett's test, which is applied to the independent samples single-factor model. The hypotheses we test are

H1At least two variances differ The test statistic is

where

(Note: ln represents the natural logarithm.)

When the null hypothesis is true B = 0. We reject the null hypothesis only when B is large. The critical value is determined from the sampling distribution, which is chi-squared distributed with k 1 degrees of freedom. The required condition is the same as the condition for the analysis of variance; the populations must be normal. We will only do Bartletts test using the Excel tool and the p-value rule. Lets work through it with the Apple juice example from the notes. We need to test the required condition that the population variances are equal using Bartletts test. The hypotheses are: H0: H1: At least two variances differ Lets use alpha = 0.05 Using the p-value rule, we will reject if the p-value < 0.05. Now, going to Excel, Data Analysis Plus, and Bartletts Test, specify the input range and alpha (Even though we wont use alpha, we will only use the p-value). We get the following output:

Bartlett's Test SUMMARY Groups Convenience Quality Price

Variances 10775 7238.105 8670.239

B Stat df p-value chi-squared Critical

0.738865 2 0.6911 5.9915

Since 0.6911 is NOT less than 0.05, we do NOT REJECT the null hypothesis and conclude that there is NOT enough evidence to conclude that at least two variances differ. Since there is not enough evidence to conclude that at least two variance differ, the required condition for the one-way ANOVA equality of variances is met.