u04d1 Repeated Measures ANOVA

Address one of the following questions and post your analysis to the discussion:
1. Identify a research question from your professional life, research interests, or everyday
experience that interests you and could be addressed by a one-way repeated measures
ANOVA. Describe the independent variable and levels (groups), the dependent variable
and its associated measurement scale, and the expected outcome. Indicate why ANOVA
would be an appropriate analysis for this research question.
2. Why is the SS
error
term in a repeated measures ANOVA typically smaller than the SS
within

term for a between-subject ANOVA?
3. What is the compound symmetry assumption? What is sphericity? What information
from the IBM SPSS printout helps us to evaluate whether the sphericity assumption is
violated?
Question #2: Why is the SS
error
term in a repeated measures ANOVA typically smaller than the
SS
within
term for a between-subject ANOVA?
The answer to the above question actually represents one of two unique advantages of the
repeated measures ANOVA over the between-subject ANOVA. The advantage, in addition to
the smaller SS
error
term explained below, is that repeated measures ANOVA provides a unique
way to handle a violation of the assumption of independence of observations which is
fundamental to the independent t test and the between-S one way ANOVA (Warner, 2008). The
repeated measures ANOVA handles this discrepancy by including a factor (SS
persons
) that relates
to stable variations among participants in the repeated measures model to statistically control the
variability of these systematic correlations.
Now, why is the SS
error
term in a repeated measures ANOVA typically smaller than the SS
within

term for a between-subject ANOVA? This question addresses the other unique advantage of
conducting a repeated measures design. The repeated measures ANOVA removes the stable
variances among participants that is included in the within group error variance of the between-S
ANOVA. The repeated measures ANOVA effectively accomplishes this by creating a separate
SS term (SS
persons
) to compute this variance (Warner, 2008). Unlike the error term SS
within
in a
between-S ANOVA design, the SS
persons
term is removed from the error term SS
error
in the
repeated measures ANOVA calculation of the F ratio. This essentially means that the error term
SS
within
for the between-S ANOVA is larger than the repeated measures ANOVA error term
SS
error
.
Therefore, in most cases the repeated measures ANOVA will provide better statistical power
with one exception. The between-S F ratio has a larger df term than the repeated measures F
ratio which reduces the MS
error
value of the between-S design. Hence, if the difference in error
terms between the between-S and repeated measures (SS
within
- SS
error
) is does not offset this
decrease in degrees of freedom, the statistical power of the repeated measures ANOVA may not
represent a significant advantage.
Anthony Rhodes
General Psychology PhD

References
Warner, R.M. (2008). Applied statistics: From Bivariate Through Multivariate Techniques.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN: 9780761927723.