Purpose of Hypothesis Testing • The purpose of hypothesis testing is to assist administrators and clinicians in making decisions.• In practice, it is not uncommon for samples to be small relative to the size of the population, or to have samples that are highly skewed, and hence the assumption of normality is violated. – Most computer packages include an analytical procedure (For example, the Shapiro-Wilkor Anderson-Darling test) for testing normality. It is important that such tests are carried out prior to analysis of data.