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Statistics vocabulary · Hypothesis Testing

Degrees of freedom

Meaning in statistics, with examples

nounCommon term

In statistics, degrees of freedom means: The number of values in a calculation that are free to vary once certain constraints are fixed; it sets the exact shape of distributions such as t, chi-square and F.

In Turkish: serbestlik derecesi

How it is used

Abbreviated df and reported in brackets after the test statistic: t(28), χ²(3), F(2, 45). For a one-sample t-test it is n − 1. Students rarely calculate it by hand today, but they must read it from software output and report it.

Example sentences

  1. With 30 participants, the one-sample t-test has 29 degrees of freedom.

  2. Don't forget to report the degrees of freedom in brackets after t.

Common collocations

  • report the degrees of freedom
  • with 29 degrees of freedom
  • residual degrees of freedom
  • lose a degree of freedom
  • t-testA hypothesis test that compares means: one group's mean with a fixed value, the means of two independent groups, or two measurements of the same people.
  • chi-square testA test used with counts in categories, most often to check whether two categorical variables are related or whether observed frequencies match the expected ones.
  • ANOVAShort for analysis of variance: a family of tests that compare the means of three or more groups at once by comparing variation between the groups with variation within them.
  • sample sizeThe number of observations or participants included in a study, usually written as n (or N for the total).

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Hypothesis Testing

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