![]() In some contexts (for example, the industrial experiments that motivated Student’s efforts), there might be substantive reasons to assume equal variances. In particular, you might question how the variances in two samples could possibly be equal if the means are different. Similar to the one-sample t-test, individuals who first encounter this test may wonder about the plausibility of its assumptions. This is a type of two-sample test used to compare two sample means, where a large t-value suggests that the samples are very different, and a small t-value suggests that they are similar. The Student’s t-test assumes that the variances of two populations are equal and asks whether their means differ significantly. The name “Student” refers to the pseudonym of the author who first proposed the test in an academic journal, and does not refer to the fact it is one of the most commonly taught tests in statistics courses (although the latter is also true). How to Calculate T Using a Student’s T-TestĪ Student’s t-test is used for test statistics that follow a Student’s t-distribution under the null hypothesis that two populations have equal means. Thus, the test statistic t is equal to the difference between the sample mean x̄ and the population mean μ, divided by the standard error s / √n. Where: x̄ = sample mean μ = population mean s = sample standard deviation n = sample size To calculate the t value using a one-sample t-test, use the following formula: Then, you may well consider doing a one-sample t-test to examine whether the average blood lead level of a sample of individuals was above that medically acceptable limit. It often does make sense to use a one-sample t-test if you have a particular interest in whether a sample’s mean is different from some reference value that is determined to be substantively important for other reasons.įor example, let’s suppose that 5 micrograms of lead per liter of blood is the maximum safe amount, according to most medical references. Those who first encounter this test often wonder why they would use it, since the population mean is often not known (and the data is often collected to determine the population mean in the first place). How to Calculate T Using a One-Sample T-TestĪ one-sample t-test, or single-sample test, is used to compare a sample mean to a population mean when the null hypothesis is that the sample mean is equal to the population mean. paired t-test: used to compare the mean of two different samples after an intervention or change.two-sample t-test: used to compare the mean of two different independent samples. ![]() one-sample t-test: used to compare the mean of a sample to the known mean of a population.There are three different types of t-tests: The first part of doing a t-test is determining which type of t-test you need to do. If your data is continuous and comes from a relatively large random sample from some population, the central limit theorem implies that these assumptions will likely be approximately satisfied. In particular, the likelihood or unlikelihood that the t-test provides for a difference being due to chance depends on the assumption that the data are normally distributed and each data point’s values are independent of one another.ĭepending on how plausible those assumptions are, the analysis that follows will be more or less useful. Since a t-test is a parametric test, it relies on assumptions about the process that generated the underlying data. The results let you know if those differences could have occurred by chance, or rather, whether the difference is statistically significant.Ī t-test uses the test statistic, sometimes called a t-value or t-score, the t-distribution values, and the degrees of freedom to calculate the statistical significance of the difference. A t-test calculates how significant the difference between the means of two groups are. ![]()
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