Hi On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Stan Brown wrote: > But -- and in retrospect I should have seen it coming -- some > students framed the hypotheses so that the alternative hypothesis > was "the drug is effective as claimed." They had > Ho: p <= .9; Ha: p > .9; p-value = .9908.
You might point out to students the possible irrationality of this framing of the question. By this reasoning would it not be the case that the strongest evidence for the claim that p<=.9 would be to have 0 successes (then p would be 1)? And that the worst case (i.e., null would be rejected) would be for all cases to be successful? This is, quite contrary, I expect, to what we would normally take to be negative and positive outcomes as far as the drug company is concerned. The most (only?) sensible interpretation of p=.9 is that at least 90% (i.e., p>=.9) would be successes. Best wishes Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
