SCM 200

PSU Abington
Mr. Black
Statistical Testing for comparisons
Comparing two proportions
Comparing two means
Comparing paired data
Comparing two proportions
Scenario 1: We wish to know if an experimental treatment is effective
in dealing with back pain. In order to draw cause-and-effect type
conclusions, we randomly assign patients with back pain into two
groups; a treatment and a control group. The treatment group receives
the experimental treatment, the control group does not.
In order to determine whether or not the experimental treatment is
effective, we will use a significance test for equality of two proportions.
Here are the results of the study:
Experimental Control Total
Therapy
Showed 9 4 13
improvement
Did not show 6 11 17
improvement
Total 15 15 30
Prior to performing a statistical test, we will examine the conditional
proportions for this data set.

Experimental Control Total

Therapy
Showed 9 4 13
improvement
Did not show 6 11 17
improvement
Total 15 15 30
Significance test for comparing two
proportions
This test will allow us to determine whether there is a statistically
significant difference between two proportions.
Let represent the proportion of patients who felt better after the
treatment, represent the proportion of patients who felt better after
the control, and be the combined proportion of patients who felt
better.
represents the population-level proportion of patients who would feel
better if given the treatment, and represents the population-level
proportion of patients who would feel better without the treatment.
Significance test for comparing two
proportions
Requirements:

First, we set up our null hypothesis:

Our alternative hypothesis is
Our test statistic is

For this example, we will use alpha= .05.

You try
Medical experimenters randomly assigned 164 pregnant, HIV-positive
women to receive the drug AZT during pregnancy, while another 160
such women were randomly assigned to a control group which received
a placebo. Of those in the AZT group, 13 had babies who tested HIV-
positive, compared to 40 HIV-positive babies in the placebo group.
Perform a statistical test to determine the effectiveness of AZT at the
alpha= .05 level.
A confidence interval for the difference in
two proportions
Confidence interval for

Calculate an 80% confidence interval for the difference between the

women treated with AZT and and women not treated.
Comparing two means
Scenario 2: Researchers recorded the lengths of individual instructional
time (in seconds) that second grade instructors spent with their
students. They compared these times between girls and boys in the
subjects of mathematics.
Here are the results:
Significance test for equality of two means
This test will allow us to determine whether there is a statistically
significant difference between two means.
Let represent the mean time that the teacher spent with male
students, mean time that the teacher spent with male students.
represents the population-level mean, and represents the second
population-level mean.
Significance test for comparing two means
Requirements:

First, we set up our null hypothesis:

Our alternative hypothesis is
Our test statistic is

For this example, we will use alpha= .05.

You try:
A random sample of 200 working women reported an average salary of
$47,299 with a standard deviation of $ 3,599. A random sample of 200
working men reported an average salary of $57,456 with a standard
deviation of $5,854. Determine whether this data gives evidence that a
wage gap favoring working men exists. Use an alpha level of .05.
A confidence interval for the difference in
means
 Paired data comparison

The following data represents the ages of 24 heterosexual couples when they
were married. Let’s explore this data using codap. The data can be found on
our course Canvas page.
Suppose we want to know whether men who marry women tend to be
older than their wives. How might we determine this?

Would it make sense to compare the means of the ages?

In this example, our data is paired. It does not make sense to separate
the data, and compare statistics without taking this pairing into
consideration.

First, calculate the difference between each couple. This can be easily
done in CODAP.

Let represent the average difference.

A paired t-test applies one-sample t-procedures (from last week) to the
differences within a pair. The test statistic is
The null hypothesis states that the difference between pairs is 0. Let’s
test our couples data, to determine whether there is a statistical
difference at the alpha =.05 level.