12

Are my results significant?

Abstract

Chapter 12, Are My Results Significant?, returns to the issue of measurement error, now in terms of hypothesis testing. It concentrates on four important and very widely applicable statistical tests—those associated with the statistics, Z, χ2, t, and F. Familiarity with them provides a very broad base for developing the practice of always assessing the significance of any inference made during a data analysis project. We also show how empirical distributions created by bootstrapping can be used to test the significance of results in more complicated cases.

Keywords

bootstrap; confidence; interval; null hypothesis; F-test; t-test; chi-squared test; reject; accept

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