What is wrong with "confidence level"? If we can reject the null hypothesis
at the .05 level, we are 95% confident that a real difference exists.
Michael B. Quanty, Ph.D.
Psychology Professor
Senior Institutional Researcher
Thomas Nelson Community College
PO Box 9407
Hampton, VA 23670
Phone: 757.825.3500
Fax: 757.825.3807
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael J. Kane [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2000 12:33 PM
To: John W. Kulig; DAP Louw (Sielkunde)
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Clinical vs statistical significance
At 09:42 AM 9/28/00 -0400, John W. Kulig wrote:
>(snip)
>Say, isn't it time we revived our discussion about how awkward the term
>"significance" is for p statements? For the "n th" time, wouldn't
>_reliability_ be the better word? If p < .05, we conclude the results of
>the study will repeat if the experiment was replicated. That, in my book,
>is the definition of reliability. This was we can dispense, once and for
>all, with adjectives before the word "significance."
Hi John,
I'd be interested to hear what other Tipsters have to say about this. I
don't
teach stats, but my hunch is that using the word "reliability" would likely
lead students to understand that p = .05 means "if we repeated the study
100 times,
we'd get this result 95 times", when in fact, p = .05 means that *if the
null hypothesis
were true,* then we'd only expect to get this finding 5 times out of a 100.
-Mike
************************************************
Michael J. Kane
Department of Psychology
P.O. Box 26164
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, NC 27402-6164
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 336-256-1022
fax: 336-334-5066
