Dear Intellectuals of the stats realm,

I would be grateful if someone can help me with my predicament. I have a large sample of 800 participants who completed a measure of relationship at 2 time points. The result of a paired-samples t-test indicates that there was no statistically significant difference between both time points. I then split the group into high risk and low risk subsets of participants likely to develop relationship problems over time. the analysis then indicated a statistically significant result for both subset! I do not think that this is correct as I feel that one subset should be significant relative to the other? am I right in thinking this or is there a better way of splitting the group into subsets rather than my approach of creating a dummy variable for each subset and selecting each subset and carrying out the paired samples t-test twice?

i feel confused even trying to explain it all,,,, please help.

Thanks for your anticipated cooperation.

I have a large sample of 800 participants who completed a measure of relationship at 2 time points. The result of a paired-samples t-test indicates that there was no statistically significant difference between both time points. I then split the group into high risk and low risk subsets of participants likely to develop relationship problems over time. the analysis then indicated a statistically significant result for both subset! I do not think that this is correct as I feel that one subset should be significant relative to the other? am I right in thinking this or is there a better way of splitting the group into subsets rather than my approach of creating a dummy variable for each subset and selecting each subset and carrying out the paired samples t-test twice?