| Abstract: | A potential weakness of quantitative methods is the intrusive nature of testing in general, and pretesting specifically. The Solomon four-group design ameliorates this difficulty, but because of statistical issues there are few published examples. W. Braver and Braver (1988) suggested the use of meta-analytic Stouffer's Z to combine the data from all four groups. Sawilowsky and Markman (1990a, 1990b, 1990c, 1990d) and Braver and W. Braver (1990a, 1990b) exchanged differing opinions on this approach. The present study is a Monte Carlo demonstration that the experiment-wise error rate inflates nearly triple nominal alpha. However, when not conducted as conditional tests, traditional procedures are more powerful than this meta-analytic approach, despite the ability of Stouffer's Z to combine all available data into a single statistic. |
