The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test is a non-parametric analog to the independent samples t-test and can be used when you do not assume that the dependent variable is a normally distributed interval variable (you only assume that the variable is at least ordinal). You will notice that the SPSS syntax for the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test is almost identical to that of the independent samples t-test. We will use the same data file (the hsb2 data file) and the same variables in this example as we did in the independent t-test example above and will not assume that write, our dependent variable, is normally distributed.
npar test /m-w = write by female(0 1).
The results suggest that there is a statistically significant difference between the underlying distributions of the write scores of males and the write scores of females (z = -3.329, p = 0.001).
