Hoping to reduce the waiting time,a doctor's office tried a new way of scheduling its appointments.Populations of waiting times are believed to be similar except in central tendency.However,waiting times may not be normally distributed so a nonparametric test was chosen to compare the waiting times.The Wilcoxon/Mann-Whitney test results are shown below: Which is the best conclusion?
A) The medians differ at α = .01.
B) The means differ at α = .01.
C) The samples differ at α = .01.
D) There are no differences at α = .01.

Question

Hoping to reduce the waiting time,a doctor's office tried a new way of scheduling its appointments.Populations of waiting times are believed to be similar except in central tendency.However,waiting times may not be normally distributed so a nonparametric test was chosen to compare the waiting times.The Wilcoxon/Mann-Whitney test results are shown below:  Which is the best conclusion?
A) The medians differ at α = .01. 
B) The means differ at α = .01. 
C) The samples differ at α = .01. 
D) There are no differences at α = .01.

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The Wilcoxon/Mann-Whitney test is a nonparametric test used to compare the central tendency (median) of two populations. The result shown in the table indicates that the p-value is less than the significance level (α), meaning that there is a significant difference between the medians of the two samples at the chosen level of significance (α = .01). Therefore, we can conclude that the waiting times for the two appointment scheduling methods are different in terms of their central tendency (median).

Hoping to Reduce the Waiting Time,a Doctor's Office Tried a New