Dear Experts,
For my research, I have collected temperature values of 15 locations in an urban area (each point 6 data) and repeated data collection 6 times. I calculated the mean valess of each point in each time (15 mean values*6 times), then I calculated the mean of means (mean of 15 mean values*6 times) and finally, I got 15 values. I used these final values for statistical analysis such as t-test, Person and regression analysis. my results are good and meaningful to address my objectives. is it proper to report these results in a research paper? I am not confident about if it is a proper way to use Mean values for statistical analysis instead of original values.
Thank you for your time and guide.
Box plot of 15 locations is a suitable tool to report the data in this case.
I wonder how you calculated t-test, regression, or Pearson based on these 15 points.
"my results are good and meaningful to address my objectives." -- you did not really explain what your objectives are...
In principle, there is nothing wrong with using means (if you are not interested in the variance between areas and changes over time). Actually, if the location is your sampling unit, tests shouldnot "see" more than one value per location (which is resonably the mean). Otherwise you would have pseudo-replications.
More sophisicated models (hierarchical models) can handle replication at different levels and give you estimates of the variances in each level of replication.
Generally, no its not a good idea. You are at risk of committing the ecological fallacy unless your goal is inference about those means rather than the underlying locations. In balanced cases the means might summarise the underlying locations, but not in unbalanced cases and they'll also ignore error variance and hence give false estimates in relation to uncertainty and statistics such as correlations that depend on the uncertainty for scaling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy
Good points, Thom Baguley ! I didn't think of scaling and imbalance.
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