Solved – Compare three groups with very small sample size

anovarepeated measuressmall-sample

I have three treatments: control, treatment1, and treatment2. A total of four patients were examined after receiving each of these three treatments. The dependent variable is continuous. My dataset looks like this:

Patients   control  treatment1  treatment2
patient1    23.4    34.5         67.4
patient2    10.9    78.9         23.0
patient3    23.2    50.8        100.8
patient4    24.2    67.1         90.8

I first performed one-way ANOVA, and got a p-value of 0.45. Then, considering repeated measures data in my case (paired data for each patient), I was thinking that I should use repeated measures ANOVA, but I am having trouble in deciding which test to use for small-sample data.

I hope somebody could provide me not only with a good idea about this specific case, but also about important issues related to small-sample data analysis.

Best Answer

The Kruskall Wallis test is the most appropriate for analyzing sample sizes not large enough to assume normality. It is a non-parametric substitute for the ANOVA.