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Notice that the groups differ considerably in sample size. If I am comfortable with the sample
percentages (60%, 30%, and 10%) fairly representing the breakdown into groups in the population of
interest, then it is a weighted means analysis that I would want to employ.
Notice that the F and the 2 are larger than they were with the weighted means analysis. This
is because the group which differed most from the grand mean (Group C) had the smallest sample
size, and thus the least influence, in the weighted means analysis. When we went to unweighted
(equally weighted) means, the influence of this group increased.
With factorial designs, the distinction between weighted and unweighted means becomes
more important. Even with experimental data where subjects were randomly assigned to treatments,
there may be unequal cell sizes because of random attrition. Unless the cell sizes are proportional,
which is unlikely, these unequal cell sizes will result in the independent variables (factors) not being
independent of each other. This correlation among the factors will result in there being proportions of
the variance in the dependent variable (Y) which we cannot unambiguously say are due solely to one
effect (main effect or interaction effect). We want to know what the results would have been if the
factors were orthogonal. Since we experimentally manipulated the factors and randomly assigned
subjects to treatments, the treatments really should be orthogonal. The mathematical solution most
often (almost always) adopted here, these days, is to use Type III (Overall & Spiegel Method I) sums
of squares, which do not allocate to any effect variance which cannot be unambiguously credited to
that effect. The (now old-fashioned) unweighted means analysis was developed as an attempt to
approximate (doing the analysis by hand) the more complicated Type III analysis that is now easily
accomplished with computers and statistical software.
Some statisticians have argued that if the cell sizes are proportional but unequal, then it does
not matter whether you do the weighted or the unweighted means analysis. With proportional cells
sizes, the factors will, in fact, be independent of one another, as demonstrated by conducting a
contingency table analysis on the sample sizes – the resulting chi-square statistic will have a value of
zero. However, if there are interactions, the results of the weighted means analysis will differ from
those of the weighted means analysis.
Keppel (1973, pp 346-350, briefly laid out how to conduct a weighted means analysis for the
one-way layout.
VassarStats has an online calculator that will do a one-way ANOVA for you, weighted or
unweighted means. For the data used here, here is the unweighted means analysis computed using
the VassarStats calculator:
Reference
Keppel, G. (1973). Design and analysis. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall.