Comparative biological data might not be statistically independent due to a shared phylogenetic history and therefore violate one of the basic assumptions of most standard statistical procedures.
Norman Breslow must have had this group in mind when he noted that "some of the most important statistical procedures were developed originally by practitioners on an empirical or intuitive basis," only to be proven correct by theoreticians a few years later (15, p. 77).
According to the results shown in Table 6, one can see that 11 out of 21 pairs are statistically significantly different, using the most conventional statistical procedure to control for inflated alpha in the context of multiple comparisons (Bonferroni).
To optimize the validation, the present study describes a critical analysis of previously obtained HET-MN data to check the experimental design and to identify the most appropriate statistical procedure to evaluate treatment effects.
Factor analysis is the most powerful statistical procedure for scrutinising relations between observed and latent variables.
Research has shown that ANCOVA with pretest-posttest data is the most appropriate statistical procedure in quasi-randomized control-group designs [ 33].
The most straightforward statistical procedure for this purpose is to regress the outcome-based composite on the theoretical set of facets, using statistical regression (also referred to as the stepwise method) to remove facets, although starting with all hypothetical facets at the initial step.
