[Air-L] Text Sample Size?

[richard hall]

On 8/18/09 7:30 AM, "Monica Barratt" <tronica at 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