CHAPTER 8: HYPHOTHESIS TESTING

INTRODUCTION:

Testing the significance of difference between two means, between two

standard deviations, two proportions, or two percentages, is an important area of
inferential statistics. Comparison between two or more variables often arises in
research or in experiments and to make valid conclusions regarding the result of
the study, one has to apply an appropriate test statistic. This chapter deals with
the discussion of the different test statistics that are commonly used in research
studies.

HYPHOTHESIS

Hyphothesis is a conjecture or statement which aims to explain certain

phenomena in the real world. Statistical or not, many hypotheses are products of
man's curiosity. To seek the answers to his questions, he tries to find and present
evidences then test the validity of his hypothesis using statistical tools and
analysis. In statistical analysis, assumptions are given in the form of a null
hypothesis the truth of which will be either accepted or rejected within critical
interval.

THE NULL HYPHOTHESIS

Null Hyphothesis, is a statement which states that there is no significant

relationship or no significant difference between two or more variables, or one
variables does not affect another variable. In statistical research, hypotheses
should be written in null form. For example, suppose we want to know whether
method A is more effective than method B in teaching high school Mathematics.
The null hypothesis for this study is "There is no significant difference between the
effectiveness of Method A and method B."
 Another type of hypothesis is Alternative Hypothesis. This is the hypothesis
that challenges the null hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis for the example is
"There is a significant difference between the effectiveness of Method A and
Method B." or "Method A is more effective than Method B." or "Method A is less
effective than Method B." depending on whether the type of tests is one- or two-
tailed which will be discussed in the succeeding lessons.

SIGNIFICANCE LEVEL

To test, the null hypothesis, one must set the level of significance first. The
level of significance is the probability of making Type I erros and it ijs denoted by
the symbol a. Type I error is the probability of accepting the alternative hypothesis
when in fact the null hypothesis is true. The probability of accepting the null
hypothesis when in fact it is false is called II error and it is denoted by the symbol
B. The most commonly used level of significance is 5%.

ONE-TAILED AND TWO-TAILED TESTS

A test is called a one-tailed test if the rejection region lies on one extreme
side of the distribution if the rejection region is located on both ends of the
distribution.

TESTING HYPOTHESIS

The following are the steps in testing the truth of a hypothesis.

1. Formulate the hypotheses Ho and the alternate hypothesis, Ha.

2. Set the desired level of significance (a).

3. Determine the appropriate test statistics to be used in testing the null

hypothesis.
4. Compute the value of the statistics to be used.

5. Compute the degree of freedom.

6. Find the tabular value using the table of values for different tests from the
appendix.

7. Compare the computed value, CV, to the tabular value, TV.

Decision Rule: If the computed value is less than the tabular value, accept the
proposition. Make a conclusion out of the result of the comparison.

DEGREE OF FREEDOM (df)

The degree of freedom depicts the number pieces of independent

information available for computing variability. For any statistical tool used in
testing hypothesis, the required number of degrees of freedom varies depending
on the size of the distribution. For a single group of population, the number of
degrees of freedom is N-1, where N is population. For two groups, the formula for
df is N1 + N2 - 2 for t-test and N-2 for Pearson r. These test statistics will be
discussed later in this chapter