Tuesday, March 10, 2015

To those obsessed by p-values

I have always looked with horror at the near religious and blind application of p-values in hundreds of stuttering research papers.

Here is a blog post discussing p-values:
The journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology has come out with a ban on p-values. To be precise, they've banned the “null hypothesis significance testing procedure” from articles published in the journal. This ban means that authors in the journal can’t claim that an effect they see in their data is “statistically significant” in the usual way that we’re all accustomed to reading.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel that confidence intervals should be used more often in addition to p-values since p-values seem to be easily misinterpreted.

Jill Saunders said...

Interesting quote. I also don't like how p-values seem to be just chosen randomly with no significant reason.

Tom Weidig said...

The real issue is that so many different things can influence the outcome that p-value alone is not good enough.