Stat-403/Stat-650 : Intermediate Sampling and Experimental Design ...

Chapter 8The Insignificance ofStatistical SignificanceTestingJohnson, D. H. (1999)The Insignificance of Statistical Significance TestingJournal of Wildlife Management, 63, 763-772.Despite their wide use in scientific journals such as The Journal of WildlifeManagement, statistical hypothesis tests add very little value to the products ofresearch. Indeed, they frequently confuse the interpretation of data. This paperdescribes how statistical hypothesis tests are often viewed, and then contraststhat interpretation with the correct one. He discuss the arbitrariness of p-values,conclusions that the null hypothesis is true, power analysis, and distinctionsbetween statistical and biological significance. Statistical hypothesis testing,in which the null hypothesis about the properties of a population is almostalways known a priori to be false, is contrasted with scientific hypothesis testing,which examines a credible null hypothesis about phenomena in nature. Moremeaningful alternatives are briefly outlined, including estimation and confidenceintervals for determining the importance of factors, decision theory for guidingactions in the face of uncertainty, and Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testingand other statistical practices.Also available on the web at 11 http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/1999/statsig/statsig.htm60