Significance test or effect size?

Abstract

I describe and question the argument that in psychological research, the significance test should be replaced (or, at least, supplemented) by a more informative index (viz., effect size or statistical power) in the case of theory-corroboration experimentation because it has been made on the basis of some debatable assumptions about the rationale of scientific investigation. The rationale of theory-corroboration experimentation requires nothing more than a binary decision about the relation between two variables. This binary decision supplies the minor premise for the syllogism implicated when a theory is being tested. Some metatheoretical considerations reveal that the magnitude of the effect-size estimate is not a satisfactory alternative to the significance test.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 136 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.