Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 312

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 44 of the 44 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Taking Parametric Assumptions Seriously: Arguments for the Use of Welch’s F-test instead of the Classical F-test in One-Way ANOVA

Open access
Delacre, Marie, Leys, Christophe, Mora, Youri L., Lakens, Daniël·2019·International Review of Social Psychology

Abstract

Student’s t-test and classical F-test ANOVA rely on the assumptions that two or more samples are independent, and that independent and identically distributed residuals are normal and have equal variances between groups. We focus on the assumptions of normality and equality of variances, and argue that these assumptions are often unrealistic in the field of psychology. We underline the current lack of attention to these assumptions through an analysis of researchers’ practices. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we illustrate the consequences of performing the classic parametric F-test for ANOVA when the test assumptions are not met on the Type I error rate and statistical power. Under realistic deviations from the assumption of equal variances, the classic F-test can yield severely biased results and lead to invalid statistical inferences. We examine two common alternatives to the F-test, namely the Welch’s ANOVA (W-test) and the Brown-Forsythe test (F*-test). Our simulations show that under a range of realistic scenarios, the W-test is a better alternative and we therefore recommend using the W-test by default when comparing means. We provide a detailed example explaining how to perform the W-test in SPSS and R. We summarize our conclusions in practical recommendations that researchers can use to improve their statistical practices.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.5334/irsp.198

Cites

44 of 44 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 44 references

Cited by

See all 312

Metadata

Authors
Delacre, M., Leys, C., Mora, Y. L., & Lakens, D.
Venue
International Review of Social Psychology
Published
2019-08-01
Volume
32
Issue
1
Pages
13
ISSN
  • 0992-986X (ISSN-L)
  • 2397-8570
OpenAlex
W2944604439
Cited by
312
References
44
FWCI
20.14
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
diamond

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Taking Parametric Assumptions Seriously: Arguments for the Use of Welch’s F-test instead of the Classical F-test in One-Way ANOVA. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.5334/irsp.198
The paper
Delacre, M., Leys, C., Mora, Y. L., & Lakens, D. (2019). Taking Parametric Assumptions Seriously: Arguments for the Use of Welch’s F-test instead of the Classical F-test in One-Way ANOVA. International Review of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.198

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.