Oops—you ran the analysis you planned to run on your data, carefully chosen to answer your research question, but your residuals aren’t normally distributed.
Maybe you’ve tried transforming the outcome variable, or playing around with the independent variables, but still no dice. That’s ok, because you can always turn to a non-parametric analysis, right?
Well, sometimes.
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I sometimes get asked questions that many people need the answer to. Here’s one about non-parametric ANOVA in SPSS.
Question:
Is there a non-parametric 3 way ANOVA out there and does SPSS have a way of doing a non-parametric anova sort of thing with one main independent variable and 2 highly influential cofactors?
Quick Answer:
No.
Detailed Answer:
There is a non-parametric one-way ANOVA: Kruskal-Wallis, and it’s available in SPSS under non-parametric tests. There is even a non-paramteric two-way ANOVA, but it doesn’t include interactions (and for the life of me, I can’t remember its name, but I remember learning it in grad school).
But there is no non-parametric factorial ANOVA, and it’s because of the nature of interactions and most non-parametrics.
What it basically comes down to is that most non-parametric tests are rank-based. In other words, (more…)