INFLATED STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDENT'S t TEST ASSOCIATED WITH SMALL INTERSUBJECT CORRELATION

摘要

The independence assumption in statistical significance testing becomes increasingly crucial and unforgiving as sample size increases. Seemingly, inconsequential violations of this assumption can substantially increase the probability of a Type I error if sample sizes are large. In the case of Student's t test, it is found that correlations within samples in a range from 0.01 to 0.05 can lead to rejection of a true null hypothesis with high probability, if N is 50, 100 or larger.