# 12.5: Assumptions of the Test(s)


All statistical tests make assumptions, and it’s usually a good idea to check that those assumptions are met. For the chi-square tests discussed so far in this chapter, the assumptions are:

• Expected frequencies are sufficiently large. Remember how in the previous section we saw that the χ2 sampling distribution emerges because the binomial distribution is pretty similar to a normal distribution? Well, like we discussed in Chapter 9 this is only true when the number of observations is sufficiently large. What that means in practice is that all of the expected frequencies need to be reasonably big. How big is reasonably big? Opinions differ, but the default assumption seems to be that you generally would like to see all your expected frequencies larger than about 5, though for larger tables you would probably be okay if at least 80% of the the expected frequencies are above 5 and none of them are below 1. However, from what I’ve been able to discover , these seem to have been proposed as rough guidelines, not hard and fast rules; and they seem to be somewhat conservative [Larntz1978].
• Data are independent of one another. One somewhat hidden assumption of the chi-square test is that you have to genuinely believe that the observations are independent. Here’s what I mean. Suppose I’m interested in proportion of babies born at a particular hospital that are boys. I walk around the maternity wards, and observe 20 girls and only 10 boys. Seems like a pretty convincing difference, right? But later on, it turns out that I’d actually walked into the same ward 10 times, and in fact I’d only seen 2 girls and 1 boy. Not as convincing, is it? My original 30 observations were massively non-independent… and were only in fact equivalent to 3 independent observations. Obviously this is an extreme (and extremely silly) example, but it illustrates the basic issue. Non-independence “stuffs things up”. Sometimes it causes you to falsely reject the null, as the silly hospital example illustrats, but it can go the other way too. To give a slightly less stupid example, let’s consider what would happen if I’d done the cards experiment slightly differently: instead of asking 200 people to try to imagine sampling one card at random, suppose I asked 50 people to select 4 cards. One possibility would be that everyone selects one heart, one club, one diamond and one spade (in keeping with the “representativeness heuristic”; Tversky & Kahneman 1974). This is highly non-random behaviour from people, but in this case, I would get an observed frequency of 50 four all four suits. For this example, the fact that the observations are non-independent (because the four cards that you pick will be related to each other) actually leads to the opposite effect… falsely retaining the null.

If you happen to find yourself in a situation where independence is violated, it may be possible to use the McNemar test (which we’ll discuss) or the Cochran test (which we won’t). Similarly, if your expected cell counts are too small, check out the Fisher exact test. It is to these topics that we now turn.

This page titled 12.5: Assumptions of the Test(s) is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Danielle Navarro via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.