ABSTRACT
What Is a t Test? Because there is a distinction between the common statistical vernacular definition of t tests and the more technical definition, t tests can be a little confusing. The common-use definition or description of t tests is simply comparing two means to see if they are significantly different from each other. The more technical definition or description of a t test is any statistical test that uses the t, or Student’s t, family of distributions. In this chapter, I will briefly describe the family of distributions known as the t distribution. Then I will discuss the two most commonly conducted t tests, the independent samples t test and the paired or dependent samples t test.
