Researchers want to evaluate the effect of a new "treatment" and "exercise" on the stress score reduction after adjusting for "age".

Two-way ANCOVA can be performed in order to determine whether there is interaction between exercise and treatment on the stress score.

It is the data set used in the Datanovia tutorial “ANCOVA in R: Compare Group Means Adjusted for a Covariate” (https://www.datanovia.com/learn/biostatistics/anova/ancova-in-r).

data("stress")

Format

A data frame with 60 rows and 5 columns (stored as a tibble).

id

participant identifier (1 to 60).

score

the stress score; a simulated measure on an arbitrary scale with no real-world units.

treatment

whether the participant received the treatment, "yes" or "no".

exercise

the exercise level, "low", "moderate" or "high".

age

the participant's age, in years.

Source

A simulated dataset created for teaching two-way ANCOVA.

Examples

data(stress)
head(stress)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 5
#>      id score treatment exercise   age
#>   <dbl> <dbl> <fct>     <fct>    <dbl>
#> 1     1  95.6 yes       low         59
#> 2     2  82.2 yes       low         65
#> 3     3  97.2 yes       low         70
#> 4     4  96.4 yes       low         66
#> 5     5  81.4 yes       low         61
#> 6     6  83.6 yes       low         65

# Two-way ANCOVA of the stress score, adjusting for age
summary(aov(score ~ age + treatment * exercise, data = stress))
#>                    Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value   Pr(>F)    
#> age                 1 1093.8  1093.8  44.019 1.75e-08 ***
#> treatment           1  222.0   222.0   8.933  0.00424 ** 
#> exercise            2 1034.6   517.3  20.820 2.13e-07 ***
#> treatment:exercise  2  220.9   110.5   4.446  0.01641 *  
#> Residuals          53 1316.9    24.8                     
#> ---
#> Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1