McNemar’s Test is used to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in proportions between paired data.
This tutorial explains how to perform McNemar’s Test in R.
Example: McNemar’s Test in R
Suppose researchers want to know if a certain marketing video can change people’s opinion of a particular law. They survey 100 people to find out if they do or do not support the law. Then, they show all 100 people the marketing video and survey them again once the video is over.
The following table shows the total number of people who supported the law both before and after viewing the video:
Before Marketing Video | ||
---|---|---|
After Marketing Video | Support | Do not support |
Support | 30 | 40 |
Do not Support | 12 | 18 |
To determine if there was a statistically significant difference in the proportion of people who supported the law before and after viewing the video, we can perform McNemar’s Test.
Step 1: Create the data.
First, create the dataset in a matrix form.
#create data
data #view data
data
Before Video
After Video Support Do Not Support
Support 30 40
Do Not Support 12 18
Step 2: Perform McNemar’s Test.
Next, perform McNemar’s Test using the following syntax:
mcnemar.test(x, y = NULL, correct = TRUE)
where:
- x: either a two-dimensional contingency table in matrix form, or a factor object.
- y: a factor object; ignored if x is a matrix.
- correct: TRUE = apply continuity correction when computing test statistic; FALSE = do not apply continuity correction.
In general, a continuity correction should be applied when some counts in the table are small. As a rule of thumb, this correction is typically applied when any of the cell counts are less than 5.
We will perform McNemar’s Test both with and without a continuity correction, just to illustrate the differences:
#Perform McNemar's Test with continuity correction mcnemar.test(data) McNemar's Chi-squared test with continuity correction data: data McNemar's chi-squared = 14.019, df = 1, p-value = 0.000181 #Perform McNemar's Test without continuity correction mcnemar.test(data, correct=FALSE) McNemar's Chi-squared test data: data McNemar's chi-squared = 15.077, df = 1, p-value = 0.0001032
In both cases the p-value of the test is less than 0.05, so we would reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the proportion of people who supported the law before and after watching the marketing video was statistically significant different.