On 8/18/09 7:30 AM, "Monica Barratt" <tronica@gmail.com> wrote:
Although a lot of this is standard methods textbook content, it's surprising how many published articles use statistical inference in situation where assumptions for it aren't met. Indeed, I'm still trying to get my head around it. Colleagues of mine have said things like 'it's not a random sample and I don't want to generalise my results to a larger population as I know I cannot, but I can still use statistical tests to test variables within my data, right?' Given these things get published, I'm confused myself. Then again, what is theoretically correct and what gets published aren't necessarily the same thing...
Well, a very popular response is something like - the Analysis of Variance (or whatever method) is very robust with respect to non-normality assumptions (or whatever assumption), so it's ok. Not that I'm really expert on whether that is ok, but I do know the word "robust" is used a lot to justify assumption violation in experimental psychology circles. ...peace...richard -- Richard H. Hall, PhD Professor, Information Science and Technology Missouri University of Science and Technology http://mst.edu/~rhall