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Spring 2013 Dept. of Biological Sciences
MANOVA
Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) is simply an analysis of variance (ANOVA) with several
dependent variables. That is, whereas ANOVA is appropriate for situations in which there is only one
dependent variable, MANOVA is used when there are two or more dependent variables.
Here’s a simple example. Let’s say we want to know whether or not two different textbooks
improve math and physics scores on standardized tests. In this case, the textbook type (e.g., old vs.
new) is the nominal independent variable and improvements in math and physics scores on the separate
tests are the two dependent variables. Our hypothesis is that both scores together are affected by the
difference in textbooks. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) could be used to test this
hypothesis.
In the same way, we may want to know whether a set of environmental variables change together
in response to some treatment. For example, in aquatic systems three insect orders are considered
indicators of healthy stream conditions: Ephemeroptera (mayflies), Plecoptera (stoneflies) and
Tricoptera (caddisflies). So perhaps you want to compare the abundance of these three taxa together
between streams that have and have not been dramatically impacted by – for example – urban runoff.
A MANOVA would be appropriate here.
There are three basic variations of MANOVA:
Hotelling's T: The MANOVA version of the two group t‐test; that is, one dichotomous
independent variable and multiple dependent variables.
One‐Way MANOVA: The MANOVA version of the one‐way ANOVA; that is, one multi‐level
independent variable and multiple dependent variables.
Factorial MANOVA: The MANOVA version of the factorial ANOVA design; that is, multiple
independent variables and multiple dependent variables.
Although these MANOVA variations are used for different applications, they all form linear
combinations of the dependent variables that best discriminate among the experimental groups. In
other words, MANOVA is a test of the significance of group differences in some m‐dimensional space
where each dimension is defined by linear combinations of the original set of dependent variables.
An important question comes up when considering MANOVA. Why can't you simply conduct
separate ANOVAs for each dependent variable? There are several reasons for this. First, when
evaluating multiple dependent variables in ecology, they will often and very likely be correlated with
one another. As a consequence, the results from separate ANOVAs will not only be redundant but they
will also be difficult to explain in a unified way. The second reason is that the error rate for conducting
multiple ANOVAs on correlated data becomes unacceptably high. That is, the odds of finding
significance merely due to chance alone increases with repeated use of the same sample of data.
MANOVA allows for a unified and efficient approach to testing significance in multiple correlated data
sets.
As a final note, a MANOVA can also be used to test significance of treatment effects on multi‐species
communities. However, in this case the original multi‐species dataset must be reduced to a few
explanatory variables. To accomplish this, an initial data reduction is conducted using PCA and the
resulting PCA axes are input into a MANOVA to test significance of the treatment on the reduced
dataset.