Can you use one-way ANOVA for three groups?

Can you use one-way ANOVA for three groups? Yes, you can use one-way ANOVA for three groups (or, three levels). Actually, one-way ANOVA can be used for 2 groups and more than 2 groups.

Example of one-way ANOVA for three groups

The following is a hypothetical data example for one-way ANOVA for three groups generated using R. It has the independent variable of cities, and the dependent variable of sales.

x_1= rep(c('City1','City2','City3'),each=5)
sales=c(10,20,20,50,30,10,5,4,12,4,3,2,5,3,1)

df <- data.frame (cities  = x_1,
                  sales=sales)
print(df)

> print(df)
   cities sales
1   City1    10
2   City1    20
3   City1    20
4   City1    50
5   City1    30
6   City2    10
7   City2     5
8   City2     4
9   City2    12
10  City2     4
11  City3     3
12  City3     2
13  City3     5
14  City3     3
15  City3     1

R to test one-way ANOVA for three groups

We can fist write down the null and alternative hypotheses for one-way ANOVA for three groups as follows.

H₀: Three cities does not differ in sales.
H_a: Three cities does differ in sales.

We can then test one-way ANOVA for the three groups in R using the combination of anova() and lm() functions in R. As we can see from the output below, F(2, 12) = 9.31, p = 0.0036.

Since the p-value is smaller than 0.05, we reject the null hypothesis (i.e., H₀) and conclude that the sales in 3 different cities are significantly different.

res.aov <- anova(lm(sales~cities, data=df))
print(res.aov)

> print(res.aov)
Analysis of Variance Table

Response: sales
          Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value   Pr(>F)   
cities     2 1528.1  764.07  9.3103 0.003622 **
Residuals 12  984.8   82.07                    
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

---

Further Reading

I also another tutorial on one-way ANOVA in SPSS (click here), and you can click to read more about it.