TWO-WAY

ANOVA
The primary purpose of a two-way ANOVA is to
understand if there is an interaction between
the two independent variables on the
dependent variable.
EXAMPLE:
The aim of your study is to understand whether
there is an interaction between gender and
educational level on test anxiety amongst
university students.
ASSUMPT
IONS
1 The dependent variable should be measured at
continuous levels (ratio or interval variable)

2 Your two independent variables should each

consist of two or more categorical, independent
groups.

3 You should have independence of observations,

which means that there is no relationship between
the observations in each group or between the
groups themselves.
ASSUMPT
IONS
4 There should be no significant outliers.

5 Your dependent variable should be

approximately normally distributed for each
combination of the groups of the two independent
variables.

6 There needs to be homogeneity of variances for

each combination of the groups of the two
independent variables.
FORMULA
S Let:
a = # of levels of the independent variable A
c = # of levels of the independent variable C
ac= # of cells in the experiment
N= total # of observations in the experiment
n1= # of observations in cell 1, etc.
 EXAMPLE
A researcher was interested in whether an
individual's interest in politics was influenced by
their level of education and gender. They
recruited a random sample of participants to their
study and asked them about their interest in
politics, which they scored from 0 to 50, with
higher scores indicating a greater interest in
politics.
 EXAMPLE

The researcher then divided the participants by

gender (Male/Female) and then again by level of
education (School/University). Therefore, the
dependent variable was "interest in politics",
and the two independent variables were
"gender" and "education".
EXAMPLE

(Variable B)
Educational Level
School College University
(Variable A) Male n=5 n=5 n=5
Gender
Female n=5 n=5 n=5
 HYPOTHE
SES
The null hypotheses for each of the sets are given below.

The population means of the first factor are equal. This is like
the one-way ANOVA for the row factor.

The population means of the second factor are equal. This is

like the one-way ANOVA for the column factor.

There is no interaction between the two factors. This is similar to

performing a test for independence with contingency tables.
Test Procedure in SPSS
Statistics
1
.
Click Analyze > General Linear Model >
Univariate
2
.
Transfer the independent variable >
Independent Variable

Transfer the dependent variables > Fixed

Factors
 3
.
Click Plots

Transfer
Edu_Level > Horizontal Axis
Gender > Separate Lines
 4
.
Click Post Hoc

Transfer
Edu_Level > Post hoc test for:

Note: You only need to transfer independent variables that have more than two groups
into the Post Hoc Tests for: box. This is why we do not transfer Gender.
 5
.
Click Options

Transfer
Gender, Edu_Level, & Gender*Edu_Level > Display
Means for:
6
.
Click OK to generate the output
Interpretation of Results
 Determine whether the main
effects and interaction effect are
statistically significant
To determine whether each main effect and the
interaction effect is statistically significant,
compare the p-value for each term to your
significance level to assess the null hypothesis.

If p-value is greater than the Significance

Level, the effect is NOT statistically
significant

If the p-value is less than or equal to the

significance level you selected, then the
effect for the term is statistically significant.
If the main effect of a factor is significant, the
difference between some of the factor level
means are statistically significant.

If an interaction term is statistically

significant, the relationship between a factor
and the response differs by the level of the
other factor. In this case, you should not
interpret the main effects without considering
the interaction effect.
Sources:
https://statistics.laerd.com/spss-
tutorials/two-way-anova-using-spss-
statistics-2.php

http://support.minitab.com/en-us/minitab-
express/1/help-and-how-to/modeling-
statistics/anova/how-to/two-way-
anova/interpret-the-results/key-results/