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Testing Whether Jury and Judge Mean Punitive Awards Differ

Finally, one can now test whether the difference between jury and judge punitive awards was likely to occur by chance. That is, just as in the case of 2 x 2 tables, one can ask whether the observed difference was likely to occur by chance.

To calculate the probability that the jury and judge punitive pattern occurred by chance, we need six numbers: mean, standard deviation, and number of observations for both jury and judge punitive awards. All of these numbers appear in Table 2.

Use this new handy calculator, and select "Enter mean, SD and N":

Graphpad.com calculators

 

The calculation yields a p-value of just over .10. That is, there is a probability of more than one in ten that we would observe by chance differences this large or larger between mean judge and jury punitive awards if they came from the same population. Hence, the observed difference is not statistically significant.