ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE VERSUS BOOTSTRAP PROCEDURES FOR ANALYZING DEPENDENT OBSERVATIONS IN SMALL-GROUP RESEARCH

Small group investigators have been plagued by the problem of observational dependency. This problem exists when data collected from members of the same group are more similar to each other than they are to data collected from another small group receiving identical treatment. Observational dependency can result in inflated Type I error rates. This study demonstrates the effect of different levels of observational dependency on Type I error rates for ANOVA and introduces an alternative statistical procedure to address the problem. Bootstrapping is shown to be superior to ANOVA in minimizing the effect of Type I error rates due to observational dependency.