PSPP for Beginners

The t-test Family

The t-tests are a group of tests that are used to compare two groups or conditions. This test can be used in a wide range of ways. It is often referred to as Student's t-test because it was published anonymously under the name "Student".

Common uses of the t-test include:

The t tests are located under the Analyze menu in the Compare Means folder. The "Compare means" description is is appropriate because t-tests rely upon comparing group means.

The location of the t test commands is in the Compare Means folder of the Analyze drop down menu.

We will consider the three forms of the t-test in order, with the example data from the ttestExample.sav file. The data are fictitious data from a standardized math test given to ninth grade high school students. The data represent different research designs that might be used by a teacher to evaluate the effectiveness of a new teaching approach.

The data file looks like this:

A data view of the t test data

The variables in this file are set up in the following manner:


Index | Next - One-sample t-test

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows sharing, adapting, and remixing.