Statistical Significance – Understanding Double Superscripts in ANOVA Tables of ‘Ad Hoc’ Results

anovastatistical significance

What is this alphabet (a,b,c) and what does its combination mean in the table?

I have read a lot of literature similar to my work and it shows that most of the researchers have used different superscript letters a, b, c, and d along with the data. It is written "the values with different superscript letters in a column are significantly different (p<0.05)"

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Best Answer

In the first row of your table, you have superscripts $c, c, d, b, b, a$ for compositions $A, B, C, D, E, F,$ respectively.

The superscripts mean that $A$ and $B$ are not significant from each other in a statistical sense. Also, that $D$ and $E$ are not significantly different. However, significant differences were found between $A$ and $C,$ between $B$ and $C,$ between $E$ and $F$ (among other differences).

More generally, it is important to understand that "lack of significant difference" is not the same thing as "exact equality".

In a similar analysis of this kind with $A$ significantly different from $C,$ you may have $B$ with an intermediate value between $A$ and $C$ and yet not be able to decide from the data whether to "group" $B$ with $A,$ $B$ with $C,$ or neither. That's why some of the rows in your table have items with double (indecisive) superscripts.

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