One-way ANOVA in SPSS Statistics

Introduction
The one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to determine whether there are
any significant differences between the means of two or more independent (unrelated)
groups (although you tend to only see it used when there are a minimum of three,
rather than two groups). For example, you could use a one-way ANOVA to
understand whether exam performance differed based on test anxiety levels amongst
students, dividing students into three independent groups (e.g., low, medium and high-
stressed students). Also, it is important to realize that the one-way ANOVA is
an omnibus test statistic and cannot tell you which specific groups were significantly
different from each other; it only tells you that at least two groups were different.
Since you may have three, four, five or more groups in your study design, determining
which of these groups differ from each other is important. You can do this using a
post-hoc test (N.B., we discuss post-hoc tests later in this guide).

NOTE: If your study design not only involves one dependent variable and one
independent variable, but also a third variable (known as a "covariate") that you want
to "statistically control", you may need to perform an ANCOVA (analysis of
covariance), which can be thought of as an extension of the one-way ANOVA. To
learn more, see our SPSS Statistics guide on ANCOVA. Alternatively, if your
dependent variable is the time until an event happens, you might need to run
a Kaplan-Meier analysis.

This "quick start" guide shows you how to carry out a one-way ANOVA using SPSS
Statistics, as well as interpret and report the results from this test. Since the one-way
ANOVA is often followed up with post-hoc tests, we also show you how to carry out
these using SPSS Statistics. However, before we introduce you to this procedure, you
need to understand the different assumptions that your data must meet in order for a
one-way ANOVA to give you a valid result. We discuss these assumptions next.
Assumptions
When you choose to analyse your data using a one-way ANOVA, part of the process
involves checking to make sure that the data you want to analyse can actually be
analysed using a one-way ANOVA. You need to do this because it is only appropriate
to use a one-way ANOVA if your data "passes" six assumptions that are required for a
one-way ANOVA to give you a valid result. In practice, checking for these six
assumptions just adds a little bit more time to your analysis, requiring you to click a
few more buttons in SPSS Statistics when performing your analysis, as well as think a
little bit more about your data, but it is not a difficult task.

Before we introduce you to these six assumptions, do not be surprised if, when
analysing your own data using SPSS Statistics, one or more of these assumptions is
violated (i.e., is not met). This is not uncommon when working with real-world data
rather than textbook examples, which often only show you how to carry out a one-
way ANOVA when everything goes well! However, don’t worry. Even when your
data fails certain assumptions, there is often a solution to overcome this. First, let’s
take a look at these six assumptions:

o Assumption #1: Your dependent variable should be measured at

the interval or ratio level (i.e., they are continuous). Examples of variables
that meet this criterion include revision time (measured in hours), intelligence
(measured using IQ score), exam performance (measured from 0 to 100),
weight (measured in kg), and so forth. You can learn more about interval and
ratio variables in our article:Types of Variable.
o Assumption #2: Your independent variable should consist of two or more
categorical, independent groups. Typically, a one-way ANOVA is used when
you have three or more categorical, independent groups, but it can be used for
just two groups (but an independent-samples t-test is more commonly used for
two groups). Example independent variables that meet this criterion include
ethnicity (e.g., 3 groups: Caucasian, African American and Hispanic), physical
activity level (e.g., 4 groups: sedentary, low, moderate and high), profession
(e.g., 5 groups: surgeon, doctor, nurse, dentist, therapist), and so forth.
o Assumption #3: You should have independence of observations, which
means that there is no relationship between the observations in each group or
between the groups themselves. For example, there must be different
 participants in each group with no participant being in more than one group.
This is more of a study design issue than something you can test for, but it is an
important assumption of the one-way ANOVA. If your study fails this
assumption, you will need to use another statistical test instead of the one-way
ANOVA (e.g., a repeated measures design). If you are unsure whether your
study meets this assumption, you can use our Statistical Test Selector, which is
part of our enhanced guides.
o Assumption #4: There should be no significant outliers. Outliers are simply
single data points within your data that do not follow the usual pattern (e.g., in
a study of 100 students' IQ scores, where the mean score was 108 with only a
small variation between students, one student had a score of 156, which is very
unusual, and may even put her in the top 1% of IQ scores globally). The
problem with outliers is that they can have a negative effect on the one-way
ANOVA, reducing the validity of your results. Fortunately, when using SPSS
Statistics to run a one-way ANOVA on your data, you can easily detect
possible outliers. In our enhanced one-way ANOVA guide, we: (a) show you
how to detect outliers using SPSS Statistics; and (b) discuss some of the
options you have in order to deal with outliers. You can learn more about our
enhanced one-way ANOVA guide here.
o Assumption #5: Your dependent variable should be approximately
normally distributed for each category of the independent variable. We
talk about the one-way ANOVA only requiring approximately normal data
because it is quite "robust" to violations of normality, meaning that assumption
can be a little violated and still provide valid results. You can test for normality
using the Shapiro-Wilk test of normality, which is easily tested for using SPSS
Statistics. In addition to showing you how to do this in our enhanced one-way
ANOVA guide, we also explain what you can do if your data fails this
assumption (i.e., if it fails it more than a little bit). Again, you can learn
more here.
o Assumption #6: There needs to be homogeneity of variances. You can test
this assumption in SPSS Statistics using Levene's test for homogeneity of
variances. If your data fails this assumption, you will need to not only carry out
a Welch ANOVA instead of a one-way ANOVA, which you can do using
SPSS Statistics, but also use a different post-hoc test. In our enhanced one-way
ANOVA guide, we (a) show you how to perform Levene’s test for
homogeneity of variances in SPSS Statistics, (b) explain some of the things you
 will need to consider when interpreting your data, and (c) present possible ways
to continue with your analysis if your data fails to meet this assumption,
including running a Welch ANOVA in SPSS Statistics instead of a one-way
ANOVA, and a Games-Howell test instead of a Tukey post-hoc test (learn
more here).

You can check assumptions #4, #5 and #6 using SPSS Statistics. Before doing this,
you should make sure that your data meets assumptions #1, #2 and #3, although you
don't need SPSS Statistics to do this. When moving on to assumptions #4, #5 and #6,
we suggest testing them in this order because it represents an order where, if a
violation to the assumption is not correctable, you will no longer be able to use a one-
way ANOVA (although you may be able to run another statistical test on your data
instead). Just remember that if you do not run the statistical tests on these assumptions
correctly, the results you get when running a one-way ANOVA might not be valid.
This is why we dedicate a number of sections of our enhanced one-way ANOVA
guide to help you get this right.

Example
A manager wants to raise the productivity at his company by increasing the speed at which his
employees can use a particular spreadsheet program. As he does not have the skills in-house, he
employs an external agency which provides training in this spreadsheet program. They offer 3
courses: a beginner, intermediate and advanced course. He is unsure which course is needed for
the type of work they do at his company, so he sends 10 employees on the beginner course, 10
on the intermediate and 10 on the advanced course. When they all return from the training, he
gives them a problem to solve using the spreadsheet program, and times how long it takes them
to complete the problem. He then compares the three courses (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
to see if there are any differences in the average time it took to complete the problem.

Setup in SPSS Statistics

In SPSS Statistics, we separated the groups for analysis by creating a grouping variable
called Course (i.e., the independent variable), and gave the beginners course a value of "1", the
intermediate course a value of "2" and the advanced course a value of "3". Time to complete the
set problem was entered under the variable name Time (i.e., the dependent variable). In our
enhanced one-way ANOVA guide, we show you how to correctly enter data in SPSS Statistics to
run a one-way ANOVA (see here). You can learn about our enhanced data setup content in
 general here. Alternately, we have a generic, "quick start" guide to show you how to enter data
into SPSS Statistics, available here.

Test Procedure in SPSS Statistics

The eight steps below show you how to analyse your data using a one-way ANOVA in SPSS
Statistics when the six assumptions in the previous section, Assumptions, have not been violated.
At the end of these eight steps, we show you how to interpret the results from this test. If you are
looking for help to make sure your data meets assumptions #4, #5 and #6, which are required
when using a one-way ANOVA, and can be tested using SPSS Statistics, you can learn
more here.

 Click Analyze > Compare Means > One-Way ANOVA... on the top menu as shown below.
 Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

 You will be presented with the following screen:

 Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

 Transfer the dependent variable ( Time ) into the Dependent List: box and the independent variable

( Course ) into the Factor:box using the appropriate buttons (or drag-and-drop the variables
into the boxes), as indicted in the diagram below:

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

 Click the button. Tick the Tukey checkbox as shown below:

 Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

 Click the button.

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 Click the button. Tick the Descriptive checkbox in the –Statistics– area, as shown
below:
 Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

NOTE: When testing for some of the assumptions of the one-way ANOVA, you will need to
tick more of these checkboxes. We take you through this, including how to interpret the output,
in our enhanced one-way ANOVA guide.

 Click the button.

 Click the button.

SPSS Statistics Output of the one-way ANOVA

SPSS Statistics generates quite a few tables in its one-way ANOVA analysis. In this
section, we show you only the main tables required to understand your results from
the one-way ANOVA and Tukey post-hoc tests. For a complete explanation of the
output you have to interpret when checking your data for the six assumptions required
to carry out a one-way ANOVA, see our enhanced guide here. This includes relevant
boxplots, and output from your Shapiro-Wilk test for normality and test for
homogeneity of variances. Also, if your data failed the assumption of homogeneity of
variances, we take you through the results for Welch ANOVA, which you will have to
interpret rather than the standard one-way ANOVA in this guide. Below, we focus on
the descriptives table, as well as the results for the one-way ANOVA and Tukey post-
hoc test only. We will go through each table in turn.

Descriptives Table
The descriptives table (see below) provides some very useful descriptive statistics,
including the mean, standard deviation and 95% confidence intervals for the
dependent variable ( Time ) for each separate group (Beginners, Intermediate and
Advanced), as well as when all groups are combined (Total). These figures are useful
when you need to describe your data.

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

ANOVA Table
This is the table that shows the output of the ANOVA analysis and whether we have a
statistically significant difference between our group means. We can see that the
significance level is 0.021 (p = .021), which is below 0.05. and, therefore, there is a
statistically significant difference in the mean length of time to complete the
spreadsheet problem between the different courses taken. This is great to know, but
we do not know which of the specific groups differed. Luckily, we can find this out in
the Multiple Comparisons table which contains the results of post-hoc tests.
Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

Multiple Comparisons Table

From the results so far, we know that there are significant differences between the
groups as a whole. The table below, Multiple Comparisons, shows which groups
differed from each other. The Tukey post-hoc test is generally the preferred test for
conducting post-hoc tests on a one-way ANOVA, but there are many others. We can
see from the table below that there is a significant difference in time to complete the
problem between the group that took the beginner course and the intermediate course
(p = 0.046), as well as between the beginner course and advanced course (p = 0.034).
However, there were no differences between the groups that took the intermediate and
advanced course (p = 0.989).

Published with written permission from SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation.

It is also possible to run comparisons between specific groups that you decided were
of interest before you looked at your results. For example, you might have expressed
an interest in knowing the difference in the completion time between the beginner and
 intermediate course groups. This type of comparison is often called a planned contrast
or a simple custom contrast. However, you do not have to confine yourself to the
comparison between two time points only. You might have had an interest in
understanding the difference in completion time between the beginner course group
and the average of the intermediate and advanced course groups. This is called a
complex contrast. All these types of custom contrast are available in SPSS Statistics.
In our enhanced guide we show you how to run custom contrasts in SPSS Statistics
using syntax (or sometimes a combination of the graphical user interface and syntax)
and how to interpret and report the results. In addition, we also show how to "trick"
SPSS Statistics into applying a Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons which
it would otherwise not do.

Reporting the output of the one-way ANOVA

Based on the results above, we could report the results of the study as follows (N.B.,
this does not include the results from your assumptions tests or effect size
calculations):

 General

There was a statistically significant difference between groups as determined by one-

way ANOVA (F(2,27) = 4.467, p = .021). A Tukey post-hoc test revealed that the time to
complete the problem was statistically significantly lower after taking the intermediate
(23.6 ± 3.3 min, p = .046) and advanced (23.4 ± 3.2 min, p = .034) course compared to
the beginners course (27.2 ± 3.0 min). There were no statistically significant differences
between the intermediate and advanced groups (p = .989).