Attitudes Toward Autism - Essay Example

The data available with the survey has made use of the one-way ANOVA test and compared the ethnicities of users with their responses to the question of whether they personally knew a person known to suffer from Autism. In this context, it is assumed that the respondents’ answers were considered with the assumption that personally knowing someone with Autism was equivalent to the presence of such suffering individuals within friends and family. The one-way ANOVA test presented the following outputs results.

The purpose of the ANOVA test in this context is to identify variations over the extent to which different ethnicities are aware of the existence of Autism within their communities. The null hypothesis assumes that there is no difference amongst the various ethnic groups over the presence of Autism. However, the ANOVA analysis presents a significance value (0.000), which is less than the confidence levels of 0.05, leading to a rejection of the null hypothesis. This establishes that different ethnicities have different opinions and knowledge over the existence of Autism within their groups.

The above tests still provide a significance value well below the confidence intervals (< 0.05), which provides sufficient ground to reject the null hypothesis. To determine the ethnic groups that are responsible for the difference in perceptions, the Games-Howell Post Hoc test was performed with the following results. The reason for choosing the Games Howell post-hoc test was due to fact that it does not rely on homogeneity of variance. SPSS marks significant differences with an asterisk as shown in the figure above.

From the figure, it is clearly evident that the understanding of existence of Autism varies significantly amongst the different groups. Most importantly, there were significant differences observed between different groups including Afro-Caribbean &