Equivalence testing - how to show the absence of an effect
Arndt Regorz, Dipl. Kfm. & M.Sc. Psychologie, 11/28/2020
If your theory predicts the absence of an effect that is not so easy to test. One option is using equivalence testing. The following tutorials show you how to implement this approach with SPSS, R and jamovi.
Content
1. YouTube video tutorials about equivalence testing with SPSS
For running an equivalence test for a group comparison you could use SPSS and an online effect size calculator to construct a 90% confidence interval for d:
(Note: When you click on this video you are using a service offered by YouTube.)
For testing whether a correlation is equivalent to zero you need SPSS syntax in order to construct a 90% confidence interval for r:
(Note: When you click on this video you are using a service offered by YouTube.)
2. YouTube video tutorials about equivalence testing with R and jamovi
For R and the statistics software jamovi here are two tutorials, equivalence testing for group differences and for correlations:
(Note: When you click on those videos you are using a service offered by YouTube.)
3. References
Lakens, D. (2017). Equivalence tests: a practical primer for t tests, correlations, and meta-analyses. Social psychological and personality science, 8, 355-362. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617697177
Lakens, D., Scheel, A. M., & Isager, P. M. (2018). Equivalence testing for psychological research: A tutorial. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1, 259-269. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245918770963
Schuirmann, D. J. (1987). A comparison of the two one-sided tests procedure and the power approach for assessing the equivalence of average bioavailability. Journal of pharmacokinetics and biopharmaceutics, 15, 657-680. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01068419