I have a variable that is not normally distributed. The two groups are statistically significantly different using a non-parametric test. However, they do not "look" different when reporting the medians (1 vs 1 in each group with diff confidence intervals). So in the same paper can I also report the mean along with the standard deviation because the two groups look different that way – but "legally" I would be doing the stats based on the median and in the methods state that for non-normal variables I used mann-whitney).
so perhaps saying groups 1 and 2 had medians of 1 (CI range) and the means were 3.1 (SD) vs 2.7 (SD) respectively"
A similar question: can I state both the mean and median in the text of the paper and then graphically display the means along with the SEM or SD error bars?
Best Answer
This might depend on your field, but in econometrics it is quite common to report summary statistics on your data. And these statistics are often not used in tests. If it is informative to the reader and does not create confusion, I don't see anything wrong with it.