Certainly! Let’s consider a real-world scenario where we would use a two independent sample test:

Scenario: Energy Drinks and Reaction Times

Imagine you work at a research institution and you’re tasked with investigating whether two different brands of energy drinks (let’s call them Brand A and Brand B) have any effect on the reaction times of individuals.

You decide to set up an experiment where:

  1. 100 participants drink Brand A.
  2. Another 100 participants drink Brand B.
  3. After drinking, you measure their reaction times using a standard test.

Hypotheses:

  • Null Hypothesis (): The mean reaction time of individuals drinking Brand A is equal to the mean reaction time of individuals drinking Brand B.
  • Alternative Hypothesis (): The mean reaction time of individuals drinking Brand A is not equal to the mean reaction time of individuals drinking Brand B.

Data:

Let’s assume you’ve gathered the following data:

  • Brand A:
    • Sample Size (): 100
    • Sample Mean (): 420 milliseconds (ms)
    • Sample Standard Deviation (): 50 ms
  • Brand B:
    • Sample Size (): 100
    • Sample Mean (): 430 ms
    • Sample Standard Deviation (): 55 ms

Two Independent Sample Test:

We can use the formula for the test statistic for two independent samples:

Where:

  • and are the sample means of the two groups.
  • and are the standard deviations of the two groups.
  • and are the sample sizes of the two groups.

Let’s calculate the test statistic using the data provided.

 

# Given data
n1, n2 = 100, 100  # sample sizes
x1_bar, x2_bar = 420, 430  # sample means (in milliseconds)
s1, s2 = 50, 55  # sample standard deviations (in milliseconds)

# Calculating the z test statistic
z = (x1_bar - x2_bar) / ((s1**2 / n1 + s2**2 / n2) ** 0.5)
z

RESULT
-1.3453455879926248

The calculated test statistic is approximately −1.345.

Now, to determine if this difference is statistically significant, you would compare the calculated value to a critical value (for a given level of significance, usually =0.05 for a two-tailed test). If the calculated value is greater than the critical value in magnitude, you would reject the null hypothesis.

Assuming a significance level of =0.05 for a two-tailed test, the critical values are approximately ±1.96. Since the magnitude of our calculated value (∣−1.345∣) is less than 1.96, we would fail to reject the null hypothesis.

This means that, based on our sample data, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that there’s a significant difference in reaction times between individuals who drank Brand A and those who drank Brand B.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

DeepNeuron