Studies in Research Methodology

As a natural consequence of the type of task required, the time to operate an instrument control is likely to have a distribution with a distinctive, extremely non-normal shape. The effect of this particular variety of non-normality upon (a) the rapidity of the approach to normality by the distribution of the sample mean as sample size increases, and (b) the approximate validity of certain normality-assuming statistical tests at various sample sizes, was investigated by performing a large sampling study upon a population representing time scores for the operation of a push button.