I was looking to get some advice on some analysis using R, I want to ensure I am doing everything correctly.
I want to compare test scores between two groups (A and B), I have two tests but wish to look at each individually, i.e compare scores between group A and B for Test 1, then do the same for Test 2.
Here is my example data:
exampledata1 <- read.table(text="Unique ID,Test.1,Test.2,Group
544001,3,1,A
668149,0,0,A
314205,0,1,A
646843,1,1,A
599014,0,1,A
502115,1,0,A
123725,2,2,A
170541,3,3,A
181769,1,1,A
928772,0,0,A
448116,0,1,A
287093,0,0,A
754849,1,1,A
862914,0,0,A
390557,0,0,A
749690,0,0,A
423885,1,0,A
831307,0,0,A
642633,1,,A
960592,0,0,A
162882,1,1,A
762726,0,0,A
463306,0,1,A
236706,1,1,A
979328,0,1,A
590783,3,3,A
821588,1,0,A
112601,1,1,A
921085,2,1,A
336733,0,0,A
315681,0,0,A
237933,1,1,A
698807,0,0,A
720256,1,1,A
525437,0,1,A
735806,0,0,A
260575,1,2,A
763688,1,1,A
114882,0,1,A
525912,3,1,A
972047,0,1,A
333651,2,1,A
620004,3,3,B
910745,0,0,B
837662,1,1,B
943322,1,0,B
907396,2,2,B
522464,3,3,B
637028,0,0,B
929821,2,2,B
831377,0,0,B
273030,,,B
978827,1,0,B
725910,0,0,B
519596,3,3,B
484731,1,2,B
344732,3,3,B
604679,1,2,B
213215,0,0,B
595850,0,0,B
286045,3,1,B
192411,2,2,B
747516,1,0,B
729803,1,1,B
266336,1,1,B
527596,,,B
515154,0,1,B
356337,1,1,B
245176,1,1,B
599492,1,1,B
713802,1,1,B
285520,0,0,B
254784,2,1,B
396954,1,1,B
918426,1,1,B
895730,1,1,B
436572,1,1,B
106052,1,2,B
880444,1,1,B
834328,1,1,B
180569,1,1,B
383651,2,1,B
547905,1,1,B
222952,1,1,B", header = TRUE, sep = ",")
You may have noticed my example data includes some missing values, this is true of my real data so I have included it as such in case this makes a difference.
I have tested the data for normality and found that the data is not normally distributed.
>shapiro.test(exampledata1$Test.1)
Shapiro-Wilk normality test
data: exampledata1$Test.1
W = 0.8043, p-value = 4.618e-09
As there are two groups, the data is not normally distributed and there are no repeated measures I have opted to use the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon Test:
wilcox.test(Test.1 ~ Group, data=exampledata1)
Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction
data: Test.1 by Group
W = 597.5, p-value = 0.01603
alternative hypothesis: true location shift is not equal to 0
Warning message:
In wilcox.test.default(x = c(3L, 0L, 0L, 1L, 0L, 1L, 2L, 3L, 1L, :
cannot compute exact p-value with ties
The reason I am not sure if this is correct is because I thought this test used ranking, and as stated "cannot compute exact p-value with ties". As my scores only consist of 0,1,2,3 I wondered whether this would effect my result as all of the scores are repeated a number of times?
Secondly, once I have done this I want to look at the difference between scores in Test 1 and Test 2 for group A and B, to do this would I just work out the difference between the scores for each participant then perform the same test?
EDIT: Thank you both for your help, I have opted to use the categorical analysis as this is more in line with my data.
I wondered if you may be able to advise on one other thing, having used Fishers Exact Test on the 2x5 table for each test I found a pvalue of 0.03 for Test 1. However I am unsure how I determine how the groups are significantly different? Any help would be appreciated.