Social Science Journal 'Bans' Use of p-values

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 17, 2015 @04:18AM from the let's-argue-about-sabermetrics-instead dept.

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."

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Re: What's the problem? by ShanghaiBill · 2015-04-17 05:57 · Score: 5, Informative

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.