ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Additional information > Treatment groups > Choosing whether to use treatment groups

Choosing whether to use treatment groups

In brief

By default, ANY-maze will expect the animals in an experiment to be organised into Treatment groups. This is usually what you'll want, as in most experiments animals are indeed organised in this way. However, you may be setting up a protocol for experiments in which you won't be testing different groups of animals - in this case, you can simply switch off the use of treatment groups entirely.

You can switch treatment groups on and off using the option in the Treatment groups settings.

Details

Using treatment groups in ANY-maze provides the following benefits:

 •ANY-maze will allow you to set up the groups and specify the number of animals in each one. 
 •The system can automatically assign animals to the groups, or you can do this manually. 
 •ANY-maze can run the experiment blind, which means it will code the groups and hide the meanings of the codes from the experimenter. 
 •When analysing results, ANY-maze will be able to organise the results by treatment group. Thus, reports can show the data for each group separately, graphs can show different series for each group, and 'Treatment group' can be used as an independent variable in statistical analysis. 

Unless your animals simply won't be in divided into groups, then we recommend that you use treatment groups.

You can change between using and not using treatment groups at any time. If you switch treatment groups off, then ANY-maze won't remove any treatment groups you may have already entered; it will just ignore them. This means that if you change your mind and switch treatment groups back on again, all the treatment data will still be there.

 This option may be selected and disabled in 'Ugo Basile Operon' protocol mode, if the protocol has been set to automatically randomise the allocation of animals between treatment groups. This choice will have been made when adding an Operon to the protocol.  

See also:

 •Choosing how to assign animals to treatment groups 
 •Specifying whether to run experiments blind 

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ANY-maze help topic T0584