Why don’t we always use nonparametric tests? Although nonparametric tests have the very desirable property of making fewer assumptions about the distribution of measurements in the population from which we drew our sample, they have two main drawbacks. The first is that they generally are less
statistically powerful than the analogous parametric procedure when the data truly are approximately normal. “Less powerful” means that there is a smaller probability that the procedure will tell us that two variables are associated with each other when they in fact truly are associated. If you are planning a study and trying to determine how many patients to include, a nonparametric test will require a slightly larger sample size to have the same power as the corresponding parametric test.