t Tests

Because there is a distinction between the common statistical description of t tests and the more technical definition, t tests can be a little confusing. The common-use definition or description of t tests is simply comparing two means to see if they are significantly different from each other. The more technical definition or description of a t test is any statistical test that uses the t, or Student's t, family of distributions. In this chapter, I will briefly describe the family of distributions known as the t distribution. Then I will discuss the three most commonly conducted t tests: the one-sample t test , the independent samples t test , and the paired or dependent samples t test .