I have only one male and one female respondent who responded on closed end questionnaire. I want to find mean difference related to the usage of quality of education through Online learning. In this situation when there is only one male and one female respondent can we use t-test?
With one subject in each group you know if you have a difference, you cannot tell if they are significantly different from each other because there is not a measure of variability (e.g. standard deviation) which a t-test relies on for its calculation. If you know the mean and standard deviation from other studies you could use a z-score to find out if they are different.
A sample size of 2 is impractical, even for most types of qualitative analysis, let alone quantitative analysis. Perhaps your data collection method was at fault. Online questionnaires have a notoriously low response rate.
In fact, the answer is not quite so simple. After all, two participants in the study do not imply that N=2 in the T-Test. In fact, the N in the T-test can refer to many things, not just the number of participants.
Example: The questionnaire could have 36 questions each to a woman and a man and thus there would be 72 answers, i.e. N=72. It would be a completely correct application of a T-Test to investigate whether the mean values of the 36 answers of the man and the woman differ. (Provided the usual conditions for the use of a T-Test are met.)
Now, however, the concerns expressed above come into play. Under what conditions can such a T-Test be (scientifically) reasonable? At the moment we do not know, because the questioner did not give us enough information about this.
For a paired T-Test, N refers to the number of pairs. In your case, N=1 given one pair having a male and female respondent. In such a case, the sample is too small to go into inferential statistics. You can only use descriptive statistics.
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