Statistical tests have become more and more important in medical research [1-3], but many publications have been reported to contain serious statistical errors [4-10]. In this regard, violation of distributional assumptions has been identified as one of the most common problems: According to Olsen [9], a frequent error is to use statistical tests that assume a normal distribution on data that are actually skewed. With small samples, Neville et al. [10] considered the use of parametric tests erroneous unless a test for normality had been conducted before. Similarly, Strasak et al. [7] criticized that contributors to medical journals often failed to examine and report that assumptions had been met when conducting Student’s t test.Probably one of the most popular research questions
is whether two independent samples differ from each other. Altman, for example, stated that “most clinical
trials yield data of this type, as do observational studies comparing different groups of subjects” ([11], p. 191). In
Student’s t test, the expectations of two populations are compared. The test assumes independent sampling from
normal distributions with equal variance. If these assumptions are met and the null hypothesis of equal population means holds true, the test statistic T follows a t distribution with nX + nY – 2 degrees of freedom: