Positive ranks: what it means and how to read it
In the report: Positive Ranks — Pairs where the second column is larger than the first (the difference second − first is positive).
How to read it
How many rows went up from the first measurement to the second, and the ranks of those changes.
In plain words
A teacher gave 30 students a test before a course and the same test after it. She wanted to know how many did better the second time. She looked at Positive Ranks and got 18. That is the number of students whose second score was higher than their first. Now she can say: 18 students went up and only 7 went down. The place numbers of those 18 rises in the line of all changes show whether the rises were big or small, and she reads them together with the test result.
Example
The cell with Positive Ranks is selected in each report; point at a label to see its note.
- — the sample data (50 rows) the examples use
- — two-sided
=STATS_WILCOXON(Data!A1:T51, "before,after")
Where you see it
STATS_WILCOXON— Wilcoxon signed-rank test for two related measurements of the same rows (before / after) — the rank replacement for STATS_PAIRED when the differences are not normal.
Related values
- Ties — Pairs where the two values are equal; they are left out of the test.
- Test variant —
student— the classic test, which assumes equal variances in the groups;welch— Welch's test, which does not. - Variance ratio — The largest group variance divided by the smallest. 1 — the variances are equal.
- Group size ratio — The size of the largest group divided by the size of the smallest. 1 — all groups have the same number of values.
- Test of equal variances — Tests whether the groups have the same variance. By default it is based on the median — the Brown–Forsythe modification of Levene's test, robust to skewed data; "based on mean" is the original Levene test, the one SPSS T-TEST and ONEWAY print by default — set homogeneity to "levene" to match SPSS.
Get it in your sheet
One formula in a cell gives the whole report, Positive ranks included. ALS Stats is a free add-on for Google Sheets™.
Install ALS Stats from Google Workspace Marketplace (opens in a new tab)