Experimental power considerations-justifying replication for animal care and use committees

Abstract

A common practice in poultry science is to compare new treatments with a control or between treatments tested in planned experiments. The overall F-test from an ANOVA of the data allows the researcher to reject or not reject the null hypothesis. However, the correct conclusion from such analysis depends on sufficient replicates being included in the experiment. On the other hand, restrictions are imposed to reduce the number of birds used in experiments for welfare reasons and to save scarce resources. We review the basic concepts needed to determine the number of replicates before conducting an experiment. We use these concepts to assess the results of several real experiments and to show what might be done in future experiments. We describe how to do the computations in R software.