PG851: GLM--ANOVA

This blog is for the use of students enrolled in either section of PG851. It is intended to be a forum for asking, discussing, clarifying, and helping.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Significance is Irrelevant...

...to your grade.

That is, several of you have noted changing your hypothesis because the results came out to be nonsignificant.

This is a waste of your time and it sets up bad habits. Neither of those are good outcomes. It wastes your time because an analysis is no less valid for being nonsignificant, and your need to interpret findings is no less with nonsignificant results. It sets up bad habits because it leads to fishing in this data set.

Better to run and report one nonsignificant analysis than to run multiple ones just to find a result. Remember that these are real data, so if your hypothesis is not supported, take that seriously and report what it means.

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