ABSTRACT
When to Use Factorial ANOVA Factorial ANOVA is the technique to use when you have one continuous (i.e., interval or ratio scaled) dependent variable and two or more categorical (i.e., nominally scaled) independent variables. For example, suppose I want to know whether boys and girls differ in the amount of television they watch per week, on average. Suppose I also want to know whether children in different regions of the United States (i.e., East, West, North, and South) differ in their average amount of television watched per week. In this example, average amount of television watched per week is my dependent variable, and gender and region of the country are my two independent variables. This is known as a 2 × 4 factorial analysis, because one of my independent variables has two levels (gender) and one has four levels (region). If I were writing about this analysis in an academic paper, I would write, “I conducted a 2 (gender) × 4 (region) factorial ANOVA.”
