期刊名称：Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation
印刷版ISSN：1531-7714
电子版ISSN：1531-7714
出版年度：2011
卷号：16
出版社：ERIC: Clearinghouse On Assessment and Evaluation
摘要：Assessing the comparability of different groups is an issue facing many researchers and evaluators in a
variety of settings. Commonly, null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is incorrectly used to
demonstrate comparability when a non-significant result is found. This is problematic because a failure
to find a difference between groups is not equivalent to showing that the groups are comparable. This
paper provides a comparison of the confidence interval approach to equivalency testing and the more
traditional analysis of variance (ANOVA) method using both continuous and rating scale data from
three geographically separate medical education teaching sites. Equivalency testing is recommended as
a better alternative to demonstrating comparability through its examination of whether mean
differences between two groups are small enough that these differences can be considered practically
unimportant and thus, the groups can be treated as equivalent
