P.Mean: Reporting Fisher's Exact test (created 2008-09-26).

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I am a doctoral student trying to handle stats analysis of very skewed data, so I think I've done all non-parametric tests by the book. My time for writing the report was up when suddenly, I was told by my advisor to change from Pearson chi square to Fisher's Exact test without mentioning any details how to report it and none of the books I have carry an example. Thank you so much for your very user/student friendly web page. I owe you!

Reporting Fisher's Exact is actually easier because there are no degrees of freedom to report. Just state the p-value, and mention whether it was a one sided or a two sided test. In your methods section just state that you are using Fisher's Exact test. It is a fairly common statistic, so you don't need to cite a reference.

Here's an example of reporting in a journal:

Primary outcome results indicated a non-significant reduction in the acquisition of plasma cell endometritis in the antibiotic group with a prevalence of 28% (9/32), compared to 50% (14/28) in the placebo group (p=0.11). www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17346530

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2010-04-01. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Category: Writing research papers.