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Social Science Journal 'Bans' Use of p-values
sandbagger writes: Editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced in a February editorial that researchers who submit studies for publication would not be allowed to use common statistical methods, including p-values. While p-values are routinely misused in scientific literature, many researchers who understand its proper role are upset about the ban. Biostatistician Steven Goodman said, "This might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. The goal should be the intelligent use of statistics. If the journal is going to take away a tool, however misused, they need to substitute it with something more meaningful."
speak for yourself. i've never tried using a Springer book as a nipple weight, though; i'll give it a try sometime. thanks.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Yes they can, in some cases. There was a very well-controlled study where two sets of anonymous letters of application were sent to various positions at a large number of companies from a large number of applicants. The letters included similar random credentials from random institutions, random cosmetic variations of the same cover letter, and so on, to avoid tipping the hand of the researchers. The only difference between the two groups of letters was that one were given names sampled uniformly from African-Americans, and the other given names sampled uniformly from everyone else. The names were assigned in a blind way, literally a random form insertion, to avoid introducing bias.
I'm sure you can guess where this is going. The response and offer rate to the blacks was significantly lower, both statistically and practically. It's rather hard to explain that away, though I'm sure someone here will try without having even read the study.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
There was a very well-controlled study where two sets of anonymous letters of application ...
This study was conducted by Stephen Levitt, and is described in his book Freakonomics, which is a fantastic book for anyone interested in the application of statistics to social science. Here is the original paper.
...and this isn't even the first journal to do this. It's probably happening now because an entire book has just come out walking people how universally abused p-values are as statistical measures.
http://www.statisticsdonewrong...
The book is nice in that it does give one replacements that are more robust and less likely to be meaningless, although nothing can substitute for having a clue about data dredging etc.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.