The Power divergence family of statistics was introduced by Cressie and Read
in 1984. The likelihood ratio statistic and the Pearson’s chi-squared statistic are
examples of the many members of the power divergency family which are linked
through a family parameter 
. We present here the results of a comparative simulation
study on the accuracy of the chi-squared approximation for two members
of the family (
and 
) when they are used for goodness-of-fit testing in sparse contingency tables.