Statistical Application Softwares: What Statistical Analysis Should I Use?™
What statistical analysis should I use?
The following table shows general guidelines for choosing a statistical analysis. We spc statistics emphasize that these are general guidelines and should not be construed as hard and fast rules. Usually your data could be analyzed in multiple ways, each of which could yield legitimate answers. The table below covers a number of common analyses and helps you choose among them based on the number of dependent variables (sometimes referred to as outcome variables), the nature of your independent variables (sometimes referred to as predictors). You also want to consider the nature of your dependent variable, namely whether it is an interval variable, ordinal or categorical variable, and whether it is normally distributed (see What is the difference between categorical, ordinal and interval variables? for more information on this). The table then shows one or more statistical tests commonly used given these types of variables (but not necessarily the only type of test that could be used) and links showing how to do such tests using SAS, Stata and SPSS.
Number of
Dependent
Variables
Nature of
Independent
Variables
Nature of Dependent
Variable(s)
Test(s)
How to
SAS How to
Stata How to
SPSS
1
0 IVs
(1 population)
interval & normal one-sample t-test
SAS Stata SPSS
ordinal or interval
one-sample median
SAS Stata SPSS
categorical
(2 categories)
binomial test
SAS Stata SPSS
categorical Chi-square goodness-of-fit
SAS Stata SPSS
1 IV with 2 levels
(independent groups)
interval & normal 2 independent sample t-test
SAS Stata SPSS
ordinal or interval
Wilcoxon-Mann Whitney test SAS Stata SPSS
categorical
Chi- square test
SAS Stata SPSS
Fisher's exact test SAS Stata SPSS
1 IV with 2 or more levels (independent groups)
interval & normal one-way ANOVA
SAS Stata SPSS
ordinal or interval
Kruskal Wallis
SAS Stata SPSS
categorical
Chi- square test
SAS Stata SPSS
1 IV with 2 levels
(dependent/matched groups)
interval & normal paired t-test
SAS Stata SPSS
ordinal or interval
Wilcoxon signed ranks test
SAS Stata SPSS
categorical
McNemar
SAS Stata SPSS
1 IV with 2 or more levels
(dependent/matched groups)
interval & normal one-way repeated measures ANOVA
SAS Stata SPSS
ordinal or interval
Friedman test
SAS Stata SPSS
categorical
repeated measures logistic regression
SASStataSPSS
2 or more IVs
(independent groups)
interval & normal factorial ANOVA
SAS Stata SPSS
ordinal or interval
ordered logistic regression
SASStataSPSS
categorical
factorial
logistic regression
SAS Stata SPSS
1 interval IV
interval & normal correlation
SAS Stata SPSS
simple linear regression
SAS Stata SPSS
ordinal or interval
non-parametric correlation
SAS Stata SPSS
categorical
simple logistic regression
SAS Stata SPSS
1 or more interval IVs and/or
1 or more categorical IVs interval & normal multiple regression
SAS Stata SPSS
analysis of covarianceSAS Stata SPSS
categorical
multiple logistic regression
SAS Stata SPSS
discriminant analysis SAS Stata SPSS
2 or more
1 IV with 2 or more levels
(independent groups)
interval & normal one-way MANOVA SAS Stata SPSS
2 or more
2 or more
interval & normal multivariate multiple linear regression
SAS Stata SPSS
2 sets of
2 or more
0
interval & normal canonical correlation
SAS Stata SPSS
2 or more
0
interval & normal factor analysis
SAS Stata SPSS
Number of
Dependent
Variables
Nature of
Independent
Variables
Nature of Dependent
Variable(s)
Test(s)
How to
SAS How to
Stata How to
SPSS
This page was adapted from Choosing the Correct Statistic developed by James D. Leeper, Ph.D. We thank Professor Leeper for permission to adapt and distribute this page from our site.