Hi @Kate ,
To me, it sounds like you need to do an ANOVA test of the data. Use the Fit Y by X platform, and use um as Y and sample number as X. This will show a picture like this:
Then, go to the red hot button next to Oneway and select Means/Anova. You should get this:
Notice that the "Prob > F" is <.0001, so this means that the Sample number has a high probability of explaining some of the variation in the Y (um). Before continuing, you will want to do a test of unequal variance to see if the variance from sample number to sample number is the same or different. Again, red hot button, then select unequal variance. You should get this:
All of the unequal variance tests have Prob > F to be <.0001, meaning that the variances are NOT equal. But, the Welch test also has a Prob > F at <.0001, so even though the variances are not equal, you can continue with the ANOVA comparison. Next, you CAN do a Student's-t test, but since you have more than two levels (the number of levels for Sample number is 5), you'll actually want to do a TukeyHSD test. If you do a Student's-t on this data set, you might be mistakenly saying there's no difference when there actually is a difference, Type II Error (I think). Again, go red hot button, then Compare Means > All Pairs, Tukey HSD. You should get this:
You can see there is some overlap between levels 2 and 5, but otherwise, there are distinct differences in the means. Within the Oneway platform, you can do an Equivalence test. Again, red hot button and then select Equivalence test. For the variance assumption, you'll need to select Unequal Variances since the tests all came back with very low p-values. You'll then need to enter a value that will be practically equivalent or not. You'll then get this (I put in 0.2):
What this tells you (given my value for equivalence) is that 3 out of the 10 pair-wise comparisons are different while the other 7 are practically equivalent.
To get the statistics on the distributions, Click on the Distribution icon in JMP (or go Analyze > Distribution, cast um into Y and Sample number into By. If you then click on the red hot button next to Summary Statistics, you can customize what you see. In this case, I have also selected Minimum and Maximum to be in the summary statistics. If you hold down the CTRL button while doing that, it will "broadcast" it to all the other distributions (for each sample) and you'll get all the data you need. If you want to further analyze things, you can right click the data in the Summary Statistics and select Make Into Combined Data Table. Very useful. Below is an example for sample number 1.
I'm attaching the original data table and scripts so you can see what I did.
Out of curiosity, if you can share, what NanoScope Analysis are you using (instrumentation)? I'm a nano-physicist.
Hope this helps!,
DS