There are pivotal moments in everyone's life, and one of mine was at the age of 11. Where I grew up in England there were three choices when leaving primary school and moving on to secondary school: (1) state school (where most people go); (2) grammar school (where clever people who pass an exam called the Eleven Plus go); and (3) private school (where rich people go). My parents were not rich and I am not clever and consequently I failed my Eleven Plus, so private school and grammar school (where my clever older brother had gone) were out. This left me to join all of my friends at the local state school. I could not have been happier. Imagine everyone's shock when my parents received a letter saying that some extra spaces had become available at the grammar school; although the local authority could scarcely believe it and had checked the Eleven Plus papers several million times to confirm their findings, I was next on their list. I could not have been unhappier. So, I waved goodbye to all of my friends and trundled off to join my brother at Ilford County High School for Boys (a school that still hit students with a cane if they were particularly bad and that, for some considerable time and with good reason, had 'H.M. Prison' painted in huge white letters on its roof). It was goodbye to normality, and hello to six years of learning how not to function in society. I often wonder how my life would have turned out had I not gone to this school; in the parallel universes where the letter didn't arrive and the parallel Andy went to state school, or where his parents were rich and he went to private school, what became of him? If we wanted to compare these three situations we couldn't use a t-test because there are more than two conditions.1 However, this chapter tells us all about the statistical models that we use to analyse situations in which we want to compare more than two conditions: analysis of variance (or ANOVA to its friends). This chapter will begin by explaining the theory of ANOVA when different participants are used (independent ANOVA). We'll then look at how to carry out the analysis in SPSS and interpret the results.