Specific Comparisons (Correlated Observations)
Prerequisites
Hypothesis
Testing, Testing a Single Mean,
t Distribution, Specific
Comparisons, Difference Between
Means, Related Pairs
Learning Objectives
- Determine whether to use the formula for correlated comparisons or
independent-groups comparisons
- Compute t for a comparison for repeated-measures data
In the Weapons and Aggression
case study, subjects asked to read words presented on a computer
screen as quickly as they could. Some of the words were aggressive
words such as injure or shatter. Others were control words such
as relocate or consider. These two types of words were preceded
by words that were either the names of weapons such as shot gun
and grenade or non-weapon words such as rabbit or fish. For each
subject, the mean reading time across words was computed for these
four conditions. The four conditions are labeled as shown in Table
1. Table 2 shows the data for five subjects.
One question was whether reading times would be shorter when
the preceding word was a weapon word (aw and cw conditions)
than when it was a non-weapon word (an and cn conditions). In
other words, is
L1 = (an + cn) - (aw
+ cw)
greater than 0? This is tested for significance by computing
L1 for each subject and then testing whether the mean value of
L1is significantly different from 0. Table 3 shows L1 for the
first five subjects. L1 for Subject 1 was computed by
L1 = (440 + 452) -
(447 + 432) = 892 - 885 = 13
Once L1 is computed
for each subject, the significance test described in the section "Testing
a Single Mean" can be used. First we compute the mean
and the standard error of the mean for L1. There were 32 subjects
in the experiment. Computing L1 for the 32 subjects, we find
that the mean and standard error of the mean are 5.875 and
4.2646 respectively. We then compute

where M is the sample mean, μ is the hypothesized
value of the population mean (0 in this case), and sM
is estimated standard error of the mean. The calculations show
that t = 1.378. Since there were 32 subjects, the degrees of freedom
is 32 - 1 = 31. The t
distribution calculator shows that the two-tailed probability
is 0.1782.
A more interesting question is whether the priming
effect (the difference between words preceded with a non-weapon
word and words preceded by a weapon word) is different for aggressive
words than it is for non-aggressive words. That is, do weapon
words prime aggressive words more than they prime non-aggressive
words? The priming of aggressive words is (an - aw). The priming
of non-aggressive words is (cn - cw). The comparison is the difference:
L2 = (an - aw) - (cn
- cw)
Table 4 shows L2 for
the five of the 32 subjects.
The mean and standard error of the mean for all
32 subjects are 8.4375 and 3.9128 respectively. Therefore, t =
2.156 and p = 0.039.
Multiple Comparisons
Issues associated with doing multiple comparisons
are the same for related observations as they are for multiple
comparisons among independent groups.
Orthogonal Comparisons
The most straightforward way to assess the degree
of dependence between two comparisons is to correlate them directly.
For the weapons and aggression data, the comparisons L1
and L2 are correlated 0.24. Of course,
this is a sample correlation and only estimates what the correlation
would be if L1 and L2
were correlated in the whole population.
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