This article is concerned with the question of whether the missing data mechanism routinely referred to as missing completely at random (MCAR) is statistically examinable via a test for lack of distributional differences between groups with observed and missing data, and related consequences. A discussion is initially provided, from a formal logic…

Glass's estimator of effect size, the sample mean difference divided by the sample standard deviation, is studied in the context of an explicit statistical model. The exact distribution of Glass's estimator is obtained and the estimator is shown to have a small sample bias. Alternatives are proposed and discussed. (Author/JKS)