Statistical
Treatment of Data
In
order to get the true measures of the answers needed on the statement of the
problem the inferential statistics will be used (Trochim 2006). With
inferential statistics, the study will try to reach conclusions that extend
beyond the immediate data alone. The inferential statistics will be used to
make judgments of the probability that an observed difference between groups is
a dependable one or one that might have happened by chance in this study. Thus,
inferential statistics is used to make inferences from the data to more general
conditions; descriptive statistics is used simply to describe what's going on
in the data. In addition, whenever there is a need to compare the average
performance between two groups the t-test for differences between groups was
used.
The t-test assesses whether the means of two
groups are statistically different from each other. This analysis is
appropriate to compare the means of two groups.
Figure 1 shows the distributions for the treated
(blue) and control (green) groups in a study. The figure shows the idealized
distribution -- the actual distribution would usually be depicted with
a histogram or bar graph. The figure indicates where the control and
treatment group means are located. The question the t-test addresses is whether
the means are statistically different.
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