Gm. Burlingame et al., ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE VERSUS BOOTSTRAP PROCEDURES FOR ANALYZING DEPENDENT OBSERVATIONS IN SMALL-GROUP RESEARCH, Small group research, 25(4), 1994, pp. 486-501
Small group investigators have been plagued by the problem of observat
ional dependency. This problem exists when data collected from members
of the same group are more similar to each other than they are to dat
a collected from another small group receiving identical treatment. Ob
servational dependency can result in inflated Type I error rates. This
study demonstrates the effect of different levels of observational de
pendency on Type I error rates for ANOVA and introduces an alternative
statistical procedure to address the problem. Bootstrapping is shown
to be superior to ANOVA in minimizing the effect of Type I error rates
due to observational dependency.