ONE SAMPLE KOLMOGOROV-SMIRNOV (K-S) TEST (Testing whether a sampled population is normal)

Introduction : KolmogorovSmirnov test (KS test) is a nonparametric test for the equality of continuous, onedimensional probability distributions that can be used to compare a sample with a reference probability distribution (one-sample KS test), or to compare two samples (two-sample KS test). What is kolmogorov-smirnov test? A test of whether distribution of score is significantly different from a normal distribution. A significant value indicates a deviation from normality. What is 1 Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test? 1-Sample K-S is used to test if the variable has a specified distribution. Testing by using SPSS The procedure has Option submenu and Exact submenu if you have license for Exact Test. The submenus are: Exact- You can perform exact test when the sample size is small. Options- If we want descriptive statistics for our variable, we must choose this.

Test Distribution- We must choose from the four tests listed: Normal- compare a distribution to the Normal distribution Poisson- compare a distribution to the Poisson distribution Uniform- compare a distribution to the Uniform distribution Exponential- compare a distribution to the Exponential distribution

Example : The weight of 36 newborn babies (in kilogram) from a hospital in Canada are reported as below. Test the null hypothesis that the population of weights is normally distributed. 3.12 3.56 2.33 2.72 2.99 3.42 3.25 2.55 2.94 2.76 3.25 3.29 3.05 3.11 3.40 3.33 3.32 3.30 3.49 3.35 3.50 2.88 2.77 2.29 2.51 2.63 2.96 3.00 2.67 2.40 2.65 3.15 3.20 2.91 2.80 3.23

Steps in SPSS : (Shown in video attached) Output from the nonparametric procedure :

The table that produced by SPSS contains Asymptote Significance (2 tailed) value. From the table, the result shows p-value is .837. This result is not significant. If p-value is < .05, the result is significant and the sampled population is not approximately normal. However, the result that we obtain from this example shows p-value .837 is greater than .05. It indicates that the sampled population is approximately normal.

Decision : Based on all the result that we got, now we can make a decision that do not reject null hypothesis. Conclusion : There is not enough evidence to reject the claims that the sampled population is normally distributed. So we conclude that our data in the example are came from normally distributed population. Reporting the K-S Test from SPSS data analysis: The test statistic for the K-S test is denoted by D and its degree of freedom is (df) is denoted in bracket. The total time per week (in hours), D(36) = .837, p > .05 are normal.

Exercise.

A researcher reported that the total time per week (in hours) for 30 college students spend their time on surfing internet are shown as below. Use one sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov one-sample to test the null hypothesis that these data came from a normally distributed population. 14 , 16 ,12, 18, 11, 11, 17, 10, 22, 13, 16, 24, 17, 13, 18, 25, 10, 20, 18, 15, 19, 23, 19, 22, 21, 15, 19, 22, 13, 16 Answer : There is not enough evidence to reject the claims that the sampled population is normally distributed. So we conclude that our data in the example are came from normally distributed population.