Statistical Significance: How It Signifies in Statistics Reference.

Abstract

Statistics-related reference questions may spawn heroic searches drawing upon reference librarians' ingenuity, knowledge of sources, and time. However, were librarians to understand better what many data-seeking users intend (or are assigned) to do with the numbers once acquired, they could communicate more effectively with users, find better-fitting data, and ration the heroics for must situations. Testing statistical significance is one of the major activities data-seekers perform. This article equips readers with enough of the basic meaning and method of statistical significance to improve their reference performance. It works through a two-category example using the t-test and a three-category example using analysis of variance (ANOVA), employing the widely available Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Several practical approaches are recommended for reference librarians to use when working with statistics reference questions.

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