Using Excel to Explore the Effects of Assumption Violations on One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) Statistical Procedures

Abstract

To understand any statistical tool requires not only an understanding of the relevant computational procedures but also an awareness of the assumptions upon which the procedures are based, and the effects of violations of these assumptions. In our earlier articles (Laverty, Miket, & Kell y [1] ) and (Laverty & Kelly, [2] [3] ) we used Microsoft Excel to simulate both a Hidden Markov model and heteroskedastic models showing different realizations of these models and the performance of the techniques for identifying the underlying hidden states using simulated data. The advantage of using Excel is that the simulations are regenerated when the spreadsheet is recalculated allowing the user to observe the performance of the statistical technique under different realizations of the data. In this article we will show how to use Excel to generate data from a one-way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) model and how the statistical methods behave both when the fundamental assumptions of the model hold and when these assumptions are violated. The purpose of this article is to provide tools for individuals to gain an intuitive understanding of these violations using this readily available program.