Volume 3 Issue 11 November 2011 Researchers Corner Parametric and Non-parametric Tests

Recently a friend of mine was working out (Spearmans) Rank Order Correlation Coefficient between two sets of ratio data, namely the number of journal articles published and the number of e-journal articles downloaded by top twenty five institutions in the country. True, the resulting correlation coefficient fortunately did not differ much from that of (Pearsons) Product Moment Correlation, which is more appropriate for the ratio data. Often researchers resort to known or easily adoptable techniques and tests like chi-square test or rank order correlation than more powerful and appropriate test for the data on hand. My friend is not wrong, but the rank order is inevitable if only one of the two sets of data were to be ordinal. As intervals of the ordinal scale are not equal, adjacent ranks need not be equal in their differences with the previous. Ordinal data has no absolute value (only relative position in the inequality) and hence more precise comparisons are not possible. To avoid such under processing of data, researchers must have clear idea about the types of data and the appropriate tests.

In an earlier write up in this column (J-Gate Newsletter, March 2011) I wrote on types of data and noted that based on their mathematical properties, data are grouped as Nominal, Ordinal, Interval and Ratio (NOIR) and they are ordered in their increasing accuracy, powerfulness of measurement, preciseness and wide application of statistical techniques. Further, the nominal and ordinal data are qualitative (categorical), where as interval and ratio data are quantitative (numerical). Now, in relation to this grouping, let us note how the statistical tests are aligned. There are two broad groups of statistical tests, namely, parametric tests and non-parametric tests.

Parametric tests require measurements equivalent to at least an interval scale and assume that certain properties of parent population like i) observations are from a normally distributed population ii) the study is based on large sample (>30) iii) population parameters like mean, variance, etc. are known. Some of the common parametric tests are t-test, Z-test and F-test.

Non-parametric tests do not depend on the shape of the distribution of the population and hence are known as distribution-free tests. In other words, they do not depend on any assumptions about properties/ parameters of the parent population. Most nonparametric tests assume nominal or ordinal data. Nonparametric tests require more observations than parametric tests to achieve the same size of Type I and Type II errors (we shall discuss about them in a future date).

Non-parametric tests have the relative advantages that they do not require to satisfy stringent assumptions like that of parametric tests. In other words, non-parametric tests make minimal demands in terms of pre-requisites. They are also much less cumbersome to use as far as computational techniques are concerned. They are most useful when dealing with qualitative variables and with data that can be classified in order (or as ranks). Some of the common non-parametric tests are Chi-Square Test, The Sign Test, The Mann-Whitney U-Test, The Runs test for Randomness and The Kruskal-Wallis H Test.

M S Sridhar sridhar@informindia.co.in

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