Clinical Biostatistics: breast pump trial exercise, answer 2

Question

What effect might each of these problems have on the t test?

Suggested answer

1. Treating repeated observations by the same method as independent gives us a false idea of the amount of information. This makes P values smaller than they should be.

2. Carrying out a two sample t test on paired data means that all the variation between women goes into the random variation. This tends to make the P value too large.

3. Carrying out a test when variances are unequal and distributions skew may make the P value too large.

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