Analysis of variance frameworks in clinical child and adolescent psychology: issues and recommendations

Reviewed existing practices of factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA), a major analytic tool used in clinical child and adolescent psychology, in the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology (JCCP) and noted several suboptimal strategies. Issues surrounding the analysis of multiple outcome variables, omnibus F tests, and single degree of freedom contrasts, simple main effects analysis, and single degree of freedom interaction contrasts were considered and recommendations were made about analytic strategies. Among the practices questioned were the use of multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) as a means of controlling Type I errors across multiple outcome variables and the use of simple main effects analysis to elucidate the nature of interaction effects.