Author Question: Which of the statistical principles stated below is false? a. A statistically significant finding ... (Read 59 times)

EAugust · **on:** Jul 24, 2018

Which of the statistical principles stated below is false?
a. A statistically significant finding does not necessarily have practical significance or importance. When a study reports a statistically significant finding, we also need to find out the magnitude of the result.
b. A change in the rate or risk of occurrence of something is only useful when the base rate or baseline risk is reported as well.
c. When you read about a reported relationship or difference, you also need to find out how many different things were tested. The more tests that are done, the more likely it is that a statistically significant difference is a false positive that can be explained by chance.
d. Sample sizes are dependent on population sizes. So, in order to give reasonably accurate information about a population of many millions, we have to take a sample of many thousands.

Question 2

A sociologist has been studying college instructors and is especially interested in those instructors who teach night classes. He has been collecting data for years. Some of the variables are the course grade from the student evaluations, the number of students who take the course, the age of the instructor, the income of the instructor, the field of the course (social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, music/arts), the highest level of education the instructor has completed (Bachelor, Master, Ph.D.). The sociologist has looked at relationships between many of the variables and tested if there were differences between the different fields. The only difference that was found to be significant was the mean age of social science instructors and the mean age of natural science instructors. What is most likely the cause of this one significant result?
a. a false negative
b. data snooping
c. a confounding variable
d. the wrong question was asked