Generalizations of barlett's and hartley's tests of homogeneity using “overall variability”

The generalized variance plays on important and useful role as a measure to compare overall variability of different populations in biological sciences (Goodman, 1968; Kocherlakota and Kocherlakota, 1983; Sokai, 1965). Here we present simple and elegant multivariate analogues to Bartlett's and Hartley's tests of homogeneity. Large sample distributions of the statistics are presented and the practical usefulness of the tests are demonstrated throught several examples.