I conducted a study in which two groups of teachers (pre-service and veteran) all watched four video clips of instances of aggression between students. The clips differed by type of aggression and gender of the students depicted (physical vs. relational aggression; male vs. female). After viewing each clip, the participants answered a series of questions about their perceived severity of the incident, empathy for the victim, empathy for the bully, and likelihood of intervention on a 5-point Likert scale (these constituted the dependent variables). I conducted four separate mixed design ANOVAs in SPSS for each dependent variable, with one between-subject independent variable and two within-subject independent variables:

Teacher status - pre-service vs. veteran (between-subject) Aggression - physical vs. relational (within-subject) Gender - male vs. female (within-subject)

Unfortunately, I have unequal samples sizes for the two groups (28 pre-service teachers, 14 veteran). Also, some of the dependent variables are not normally distributed. I did not violate the assumptions of homogeneity of variance or sphericity.

First of all, I am confused about checking the normality of the data vs. the normality of the residuals in SPSS. When you run the normality tests (K-S and S-W) via "Descriptive Statistics" -> "Explore," do you include the DVs under the "Dependent List"?

Secondly, how robust is a mixed/repeated measures ANOVA to the violation of normality? Can I follow the general rules of thumb regarding the degree of skewness and kurtosis?

I am a graduate student in the social sciences, and statistics is by no means my forte. I have spent several weeks attempting to make sense of all of this, but I find that I am just confusing myself further and further. Any straightforward answers would be much appreciated!

At this point, I am hoping to talk about the violation of normality in the discussion section of my paper, noting it as a limitation for this pilot study. Can anyone point me in the direction of references that basically argue that this violation of normality is not the end of the world?