What is the most Most relevant statistic method to compare those samples? One person is answering a survey. There are two type of questions : 4 questions about intellectual work affinity. 4 questions about manual work affinity. For each of these question, the person gives an aswer from 1 (do not agree) to 5 (totally agree). I want to know if there is a significant difference between answers about intellectual work and manual work, and eventually be able to say "this individual is more an intellectual / a manual" or "the difference is not significant.

Lina Neal

Lina Neal

Answered question

2022-09-09

What is the most Most relevant statistic method to compare those samples?
One person is answering a survey. There are two type of questions :
4 questions about intellectual work affinity.
4 questions about manual work affinity.
For each of these question, the person gives an aswer from 1 (do not agree) to 5 (totally agree).
I want to know if there is a significant difference between answers about intellectual work and manual work, and eventually be able to say "this individual is more an intellectual / a manual" or "the difference is not significant.

Answer & Explanation

gasskadeu7

gasskadeu7

Beginner2022-09-10Added 21 answers

I saw your question just after it was posted. My first thoughts were that a satisfactory test is not going to be easy to find. I have thought about it during the day, and I still see serious difficulties, but by not maybe I can explain my reservations more clearly. And perhaps suggest one workable method for you to try.
1) I think it is going to be difficult to frame eight Likert-scale questions that allow subjects to show their views on intellectual and manual work activities. But let's suppose that is possible.
2) To evaluate one person's view, it would be difficult to make good judgments based on a rank-based test such as a Wilcoxon test. While rank-based tests do not assume normal data, they do assume that the observations are on a continuous scale. For discrete data such as yours there are likely to be ties, which make it problematic to compute a P-value.
For large samples, the Wilcoxon test statistics are nearly normal. For eight observations nomality would not apply, and some sort of adjustment (different depending on text or software package) would be used. Even so, if someone marked four 5's for the intellectual questions and four 1's for manual work questions, results from the software packages I tried show a small P-value, suggesting a rejection of the null hypothesis that the two types of activity are equally preferred, and giving a warning that the P-value is not 'exact' because of ties.

Do you have a similar question?

Recalculate according to your conditions!

New Questions in Research Methodology

Ask your question.
Get an expert answer.

Let our experts help you. Answer in as fast as 15 minutes.

Didn't find what you were looking for?