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Conduct and Interpret a One-Way ANOVA

Conduct and Interpret a One-Way ANOVA

What is the One-Way ANOVA?

ANOVA is short for ANalysis Of VAriance. The main purpose of an ANOVA is to test if two
or more groups di!er from each other signi"cantly in one or more characteristics.

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For some statisticians the ANOVA doesn’t end there – they assume a cause e!ect
relationship and say that one or more independent, controlled variables (the factors)
cause the signi"cant di!erence of one or more characteristics. The way this works is that
the factors sort the data points into one of the groups and therefore they cause the
di!erence in the mean value of the groups.
Example: Let us claim that woman have on average longer hair than men. We "nd
twenty undergraduate students and measure the length of their hair. A conservative
statistician would then claim we measured the hair of ten female and ten male students,
and that we conducted an analysis of variance and found that the average hair of female
undergraduate students is signi"cantly longer than the hair of their fellow male students.

A more aggressive statistician would claim that gender has a direct relation to the length
of a person’s hair. Most statisticians fall into the second category. It is generally
assumed that the ANOVA is an ‘analysis of dependencies.’ It is referred to as such
because it is a test to prove an assumed cause and e!ect relationships. In more
statistical terms it tests the e!ect of one or more independent variables on one or more
dependent variables. It assumes an e!ect of Y = f(x1, x2, x3, … xn).

The ANOVA is a popular test; it is the test to use when conducting experiments. This is
due to the fact that it only requires a nominal scale for the independent variables – other
multivariate tests (e.g., regression analysis) require a continuous-level scale. This
following table shows the required scales for some selected tests.

Independent Variable
Metric Non-metric
DependentVariable metric Regression ANOVA
Non-metric Discriminant Analysis χ²
(Chi-Square)

The F-test, the T-test, and the MANOVA are all similar to the ANOVA. The F-test is
another name for an ANOVA that only compares the statistical means in two groups.
This happens if the independent variable for the ANOVA has only two factor steps, for
example male or female as a gender.

The T-test compares the means of two (and only two) groups when the variances are not
equal. The equality of variances (also called homoscedasticity or homogeneity) is one of
the main assumptions of the ANOVA (see assumptions, Levene Test, Bartlett Test).
MANOVA stands for Multivariate Analysis of Variance. Whereas the ANOVA can have
one or more independent variables, it always has only one dependent variable. On the
other hand the MANOVA can have two or more dependent variables.

Examples for typical questions the ANOVA answers are as follows:

Medicine – Does a drug work? Does the average life expectancy signi"cantly di!er
between the three groups that received the drug versus the established product versus
the control?
Sociology – Are rich people happier? Do di!erent income classes report a signi"cantly
di!erent satisfaction with life?
Management Studies – What makes a company more pro"table? A one, three or "ve-
year strategy cycle?
The One-Way ANOVA in Intellectus Statistics

ANOVA Tutorial
The One-Way ANOVA in SPSS

Let’s consider our research question from the Education studies example. Do the
standardized math test scores di!er between students that passed the exam and
students that failed the "nal exam? This question indicates that our independent
variable is the exam result (fail vs. pass) and our dependent variable is the score from
the math test. We must now check the assumptions.

First we examine the multivariate normality of the dependent variable. We can check
graphically either with a histogram (Analyze/Descriptive Statistics/Frequencies… and
then in the menu Charts…) or with a Q-Q-Plot (Analyze/Descriptive Statistics/Q-Q-Plot…).
Both plots show a somewhat normal distribution, with a skew around the mean.
Secondly, we can test
for multivariate
normality with the
Kolmogorov-Smirnov
goodness of "t test

(Analyze/Nonparacontinuous-level Test/Legacy Dialogs/1 Sample K S…). An alternative

to the K-S test is the Chi-Square goodness of "t test, but the K-S test is more robust for
continuous-level variables.

The K-S test is not signi"cant (p = 0.075) thus we cannot reject the null hypothesis that
the sample distribution is multivariate normal. The K-S test is one of the few tests where
a non-signi"cant result (p > 0.05) is the desired outcome.

If normality is not present, we could exclude the outliers to "x the problem, center the
variable by deducting the mean, or apply a non-linear transformation to the variable
creating an index.

The ANOVA can be found in SPSS in Analyze/Compare Means/One Way ANOVA.

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In the ANOVA dialog we need to specify our model. As described in the research
question we want to test, the math test score is our dependent variable and the exam
result is our independent variable. This would be enough for a basic analysis. But the
dialog box has a couple more options around Contrasts, post hoc tests (also called
multiple comparisons), and Options.
In the dialog box options we can specify additional statistics. If you "nd it useful you
might include standard descriptive statistics. Generally you should select the
Homogeneity of variance test (which is the Levene test of homoscedasticity), because as
we "nd in our decision tree the outcome of this test is the criterion that decides between
the t-test and the ANOVA.

Options

Post Hoc Tests

Post Hoc tests are useful if your independent variable includes more than two groups. In
our example the independent variable just speci"es the outcome of the "nal exam on
two factor levels – pass or fail. If more than two factor levels are given it might be useful
to run pairwise tests to test which di!erences between groups are signi"cant. Because
executing several pairwise tests in one analysis decreases the degrees of freedom, the
Bonferoni adjustment should be selected, which corrects for multiple pairwise
comparisons. Another test method commonly employed is the Student-Newman-Keuls
test (or short S-N-K), which pools the groups that do not di!er signi"cantly from each
other. Therefore this improves the reliability of the post hoc comparison because it
increases the sample size used in the comparison.

Contrasts

The last dialog box is contrasts. Contrasts are di!erences in mean scores. It allows you
to group multiple groups into one and test the average mean of the two groups against
our third group. Please note that the contrast is not always the mean of the pooled
groups! Contrast = (mean "rst group + mean second group)/2. It is only equal to the
pooled mean, if the groups are of equal size. It is also possible to specify weights for the
contrasts, e.g., 0.7 for group 1 and 0.3 for group 2. We do not specify contrasts for this
demonstration.
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