Re: Question About Tests of Normality and Choice of Statistical Analysis

Posted by Art Kendall on Jan 01, 2015; 12:45pm
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Question-About-Tests-of-Normality-and-Choice-of-Statistical-Analysis-tp5728302p5728317.html

further again.

In my experience, severe departures from normality, e.g., a lot of zeros, are apparent in the visualizations of the raw data and of the residuals. YMMV.

Of course nothing  is perfectly normally distributed.  The question might be better phrased as is the discrepancy from normally distributed large enough to influence the substantive conclusions.

What reasons are there to expect that the population of measurements have some other distribution?
E.g., we know before hand that incomes are skewed.
Rich has made some very useful contributions to the idea of transforms on this list over the years. You should check the archives of this list.