COMPARISON OF MEANS AND STANDARD DEVIATION
(THE T-TEST)
The Standard Deviation
The standard deviation is one of the most commonly used and easiest to understand
measures of spread. It also has some nice properties that will be described below.
The standard deviation is something like the average of all the individual deviations from
the mean. This is a tedious calculation to do, so we usually ask a computer to do it for us
(although generation so students be for managed with nothing more than calculators, and slide
rules before that).
The calculation is done as follows: each datum is subtracted from the mean of all data
(these are the individual deviations) About half of these deviations will be negative, and half
positive, and if you add them together, they cancel each other out. To correct this, the deviations
are squared so they will all be positive. These squares are added together, and their sum is
divided by the number of data(actually, one less than the number of data - sorry) to get the
"average" Finally, the square root of this average is taken to correct for the squaring done earlier.
Were,
sd is the standard deviation, n is the number of data,
xi is each individual measurement,
x is the mean of all measurements and means the sum of One nice feature of the standard
deviation alluded to above is that it is measured in the same units as the mean, so it is meaningful
to add it to or subtract it from the mean.
A second nice feature is that when the data are distributed symmetrically around the
mean (that is, when they fall into the famous bell curve of song and legend), between one
standard deviation above the mean and one below are found 68% of the data, and between two
deviations above and two deviations below the mean arefound95%of the data. This property is
illustrated in Figure 1.
Comparing the Means
Usually, even when the means of the two groups differ, there is some overlap between
the two distributions. How different the two groups "really" are depending, therefore, not only on
the difference between their means, but also on the extent of the overlap between their
distributions.
Illustrating the relationship
The standard deviation can help to make a more complete comparison between two sets
of data. (Here's where another nice feature of the standard deviation comes into play: it is in the
same units as the mean, so they can be added together.) Figure 3 shows why it is important to
report not only the difference in the means between your two groups, but also some measure of
the variation in each one. The means of groups 1 and 2 differ from each other by the same
amount as do 3 and 4, yet the error bars, illustrating the size of the standard deviation, indicate a
much greater degree of overlap between groups 3and4.
Figure3. The effect of standard deviation on a comparison between means. Approximately two
thirds of the values in each group lie within the one standard deviation error bars. There is much
greater overlap between the measurements in groups 3 and 4 than between those inland 2.
Quantifying the relationship: calculating "t".
The statistic "t" is a measure of the difference between two means, divided by the
geometric mean of the standard errors of the population means (a sort of average of the standard
deviations of the two populations). (The manner of calculating t depends on various
characteristics of the experiment and the data ,so this is why yoy must specify a “test type”
before you askexcel to calculate for you,
The value of targets larger as the difference between the means gets larger; but this is
counterbalanced by this measure of spread in the denominator. The greater the standard
deviations, or the smaller the sample sizes (n), the bigger a difference in means is required to
make t large. You can think of this as a ratio of signal (the difference between the means) to
noise(the variation within the population) illustrates the effect of standard deviation on the t
statistic. The same difference between means can be significant or not, depending on the amount
of variation in the populations being compared.
Notice the greater overlap between the curves on the right. (T values
calculated for population size of 10 in each group.)
Interpreting the relationship.
Tests of significance always setup a straw man, the null hypothesis, which is that there is
no difference between the groups, or no relationship between the variables. Then we find out
how likely we are to get a result like our actual result if the null hypothesis were true. From this,
we decide to accept or reject the null hypothesis.
If the category in question (e.g., control or treatment) had no effect on the variable being
measured (e.g., number of cells in a suspension), you might as well be assigning categories at
random Imagine putting stickers on tubes of cells at random some get labeled "group", others get
labeled "group2" Occasionally, such a process would result in all the tubes with dense
populations being labeled "group1", and all those with very few cells,"group2" Such a result
would give a rather target
How often would at as large as the one you got in your actual experiment be expected to
occur if the stickers were put on at random? The probability of getting as large as or larger than
yours is called 'p', and fortunately, we can look up the p for a given t and number of
measurements in any statistics book, on the internet, and inside of Excel
If at like yours is rather likely to occur by the chance procedure, you cannot rule chance
out, and you must accept that there is no difference between the means of the two groups.
However, if such a t as yours would be exceedingly uncommon in a chance process, you
may reject the idea that there is no difference between the means and conclude that there is a
statistically significant difference between the two groups. The statistics tell you how often a
result like yours might occur by chance alone, it cannot tell you the probability that chance
actually caused the difference you observed. Conventionally, if a t as big as or bigger than yours
can be expected to occur less often than 5% of the time (p <0.05) when there is nothing other
than chance acting, we reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there is a difference between
the groups.
Bibliography
1. Sharma.K. Suresh (2020). Nursing Research and Statistics. (3rd ed.). Haryana: Reed Elsevier
India Private Limited.
2. Polit. F. Denise. (2021). Nursing Research. (11th ed.). New Delhi; Wolters Kluwer India
Private Limited.
