Statistics may be intricate. In practical data analysis many researchers stick to the most common methods, not even trying to find out whether these methods are appropriate for their data and whether other methods might be more useful. In this paper I attempt to show that when analyzing even simple one-way factorial experiments, a lot of issues need to be considered. A classical method to analyze such data is the analysis of variance, quite likely the most often used statistical method in agricultural, biological, ecological and environmental studies. I suspect this is why this method is quite often applied inappropriately: since the method is that common, it does not require too much consideration-this is how some may think. An incorrect analysis may... |