Equivalence Tests

The paper

Lakens (2017). Equivalence Tests. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617697177

Scientists should be able to provide support for the absence of a meaningful effect. Currently, researchers often incorrectly conclude an effect is absent based a nonsignificant result. A widely recommended approach within a frequentist framework is to test for equivalence. In equivalence tests, such as the two one-sided tests (TOST) procedure discussed in this article, an upper and lower equivalence bound is specified based on the smallest effect size of interest. The TOST procedure can be used to statistically reject the presence of effects large enough to be considered worthwhile. This practical primer with accompanying spreadsheet and R package enables psychologists to easily perform equivalence tests (and power analyses) by setting equivalence bounds based on standardized effect sizes and provides recommendations to prespecify equivalence bounds. Extending your statistical tool kit with equivalence tests is an easy way to improve your statistical and theoretical inferences.

Contribution

new method

Data basis

none

Document

full article

Review stage

peer reviewed

Disciplines

statistics, psychology, marketing

Access

closed

Existing implementations

Code the authors or the community already shipped. This is what decides how far up the ladder a work can climb — no implementation, no tools.

• cranTOSTERGPL-3.0-onlyofficialruns here

What it can do

• Power tostpower_tost

  Solve for the sample size an equivalence test needs, or the power it has.

• Tosttost

  Test whether an effect is small enough to be practically equivalent to zero.

• Versionsversions

  Report the R and package versions this agent runs, and the paper it implements.

Provenance

Each check stands on its own. There is no single “verified” state: whether an agent faithfully implements its paper is a curation judgement, not something this registry can mechanically prove.

Machine-readable: paper.jsonld · server.json · agent-card.json

Agent: org.agenticjournal/paper-lakens-2017-equivalence · v0.2.0