The cult of statistical significance
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Date
2010-11-09
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Abstract
This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the
same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a
barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should
therefore be abandoned altogether. The present article argues that this is good advice
in some research areas but not in others. Taking all issues which have appeared so
far of the German Economic Review and a recent epidemiological meta-analysis as
examples, it shows that there has indeed been a lot of misleading work in the context
of significance testing, and that at the same time many promising avenues for
fruitfully employing statistical significance tests, disregarded by Ziliak and
McCloskey, have not been used.
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Keywords
Signifikanztest, Statistik