Research article
Why Psychologists Should by Default Use Welch’s t-test Instead of Student’s t-test
Authors:
- Marie DelacreEmail Marie Delacre
- Daniël Lakens
- Christophe Leys
Abstract
When comparing two independent groups, psychology researchers commonly use Student’s t-tests. Assumptions of normality and homogeneity of variance underlie this test. More often than not, when these conditions are not met, Student’s t-test can be severely biased and lead to invalid statistical inferences. Moreover, we argue that the assumption of equal variances will seldom hold in psychological research, and choosing between Student’s t-test and Welch’s t-test based on the outcomes of a test of the equality of variances often fails to provide an appropriate answer. We show that the Welch’s t-test provides a better control of Type 1 error rates when the assumption of homogeneity of variance is not met, and it loses little robustness compared to Student’s t-test when the assumptions are met. We argue that Welch’s t-test should be used as a default strategy.
Publisher’s Note: A correction article relating to this paper has been published and can be found at https://www.rips-irsp.com/articles/10.5334/irsp.661/.
- Year: 2017
- Volume: 30 Issue: 1
- Page/Article: 92-101
- DOI: 10.5334/irsp.82
- Published on 5 Apr 2017
- Peer Reviewed