One of the fundamental techniques used to check for patterns among data fields involves comparing means across a set of groups. In Chapter 3, Statistics for Individual Data Elements, Means were one of the statistics used as part of the investigation of individual data elements, and they were also included in the group comparison done using the Explore procedure. Here, we will examine mean comparison more formally using significance tests to assess the importance of differences that are present.
Metrics captured for individual units in a dataset, such as length of stay for hospital patients, or sales for a chain of retail stores, can be examined to identity deviations from the overall mean, as well as differences between a pair of subset Means. SPSS Statistics provides a set of procedures designed for various types of mean comparisons. This chapter will...