Hello again, ANOVA: rethinking ANOVA in the context of confirmatory data analysis
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is one of the most popular statistical methods employed for data analysis in psychology and other fields. Nevertheless, ANOVA is frequently used as an exploratory approach, even in confirmatory studies with explicit hypotheses. Such misapplication may invalidate ANOVA conventions, resulting in reduced statistical power, and even threatening the validity of conclusions. This paper evaluates the appropriateness of ANOVA conventions, discusses the potential motivations possibly misunderstood by researchers, and provides practical suggestions. Moreover, this paper proposes to control the Type I error rate with Hypothesis-based Type I Error Rate to consider both the number of tests and their logical relationships in rejecting the null hypothesis. Furthermore, this paper introduces the simple interaction analysis, which can employ the most straightforward interaction to test a hypothesis of interest. Finally, pre-registration is recommended to provide clarity for the selection of appropriate ANOVA tests in both confirmatory and exploratory studies.