Question

This activity gives you practice assessing whether the assumptions of a statistical test have been met.

To test whether military training improves reaction times, a researcher recruited active military, and non-military participants online and had them press a button as soon as an image appeared on the computer screen. The time it took them to react to the image was recorded. The distribution of reaction times for the 35 military participants was moderately positively skewed with a mean of 180 ms and a variance of 123 ms. The distribution of reaction times for the 45 non-military participants was also moderately positively skewed with a mean of 192 ms and a variance of 157 ms. An independent means t test was performed.

Why shouldn’t you use a t test to analyze these data?
None of the above. A t test can be validly used to analyze these data.

Military Training and Reaction Time Study Explain/Justify your answer to the previous question.

Answer 1

A t-test is an appropriate statistic to analyse the results of the study because the researchers want to assess if military training improved reaction time. To test this hypothesis, it is fitting to compare the differences of scores in reaction time between individuals who have received military training in the past with those who have not received any training. If differences in the performance of both groups exist, they can be attributed to the influence of military training.