What If There Were No Significance Tests?

by Harlow,Lisa L.; Harlow,Lisa L.

• ISBN13: 9780805826340
• ISBN10: 0805826343
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-08-01
• Publisher: Psychology Pres

Summary

This book is the result of a spirited debate stimulated by a recent meeting of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. Although the viewpoints span a range of perspectives, the overriding theme that emerges states that significance testing may still be useful if supplemented with some or all of the following -- Bayesian logic, caution, confidence intervals, effect sizes and power, other goodness of approximation measures, replication and meta-analysis, sound reasoning, and theory appraisal and corroboration. The book is organized into five general areas. The first presents an overview of significance testing issues that sythesizes the highlights of the remainder of the book. The next discusses the debate in which significance testing should be rejected or retained. The third outlines various methods that may supplement current significance testing procedures. The fourth discusses Bayesian approaches and methods and the use of confidence intervals versus significance tests. The last presents the philosophy of science perspectives. Rather than providing definitive prescriptions, the chapters are largely suggestive of general issues, concerns, and application guidelines. The editors allow readers to choose the best way to conduct hypothesis testing in their respective fields. For anyone doing research in the social sciences, this book is bound to become "must" reading.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix	(1)
Reviewers	x	(1)
Acknowledgments	xi	(2)
Preface	xiii	(2)
About the Authors	xv
Overview
1. Significance Testing Introduction and Overview	1	(20)
Lisa L. Harlow
The Debate: Against and For Significance Testing	21	(124)
2. The Earth is Round (p less than .05)	21	(16)
Jacob Cohen
3. Eight Common but False Objections to the Discontinuation of Significance Testing in the Analysis of Research Data	37	(28)
Frank L. Schmidt
John E. Hunter
4. There is a Time and Place for Significance Testing	65	(52)
Stanley A. Mulaik
Nambury S. Raju
Richard A. Harshman
5. A Retrospective on the Significance Test Ban of 1999 (If There Were No Significance Tests, They Would be Invented)	117	(28)
Robert P. Abelson
Suggested Alternatives to Significance Testing	145	(142)
6. Reforming Significance Testing via Three-Valued Logic	145	(30)
Richard J. Harris
7. A Case Study in the Failure of Psychology as a Cumulative Science: The Spontaneous Recovery of Verbal Learning	175	(24)
Joseph S. Rossi
8. Goodness of Approximation in the Linear Model	199	(22)
Roderick P. McDonald
9. Noncentrality Interval Estimation and the Evaluation of Statistical Models	221	(38)
James H. Steiger
Rachel T. Fouladi
10. When Confidence Intervals Should be Used Instead of Statistical Significance Tests, and Vice Versa	259	(28)
Charles S. Reichardt
Harry F. Gollob
A Bayesian Perspective on Hypothesis Testing	287	(48)
11. An Introduction to Bayesian Inference and its Applications	287	(32)
Robert M. Pruzek
12. Testing `Small', not Null, Hypotheses: Classical and Bayesian Approaches	319	(16)
David M. Rindskopf
Philosophy of Science Issues	335	(92)
13. Good Science is Abductive, not Hypothetico-Deductive	335	(58)
William W. Rozeboom
14. The Problem is Epistemology, Not Statistics: Replace Significance Tests by Confidence Intervals and Quantify Accuracy of Risky Numerical Predictions	393	(34)
Paul E. Meehl
Author Index	427	(6)
Subject Index	433