文档介绍：238 Resampling: The New Statistics
CHAPTER
The Concept of Statistical
Significance in Testing
16 Hypotheses
The Logic of Hypothesis Tests
The Concept of Statistical Significance
This chapter offers an interpretation of the meaning of the concept of
statistical significance and the term “significant” in connection with
the logic of significance tests. It also discusses the concept of “level
of significance.”
The logic of hypothesis tests
Let’s address the logic of hypothesis tests by considering a
variety of examples in everyday thinking:
Consider the nine-year-old who tells the teacher that
the dog ate the homework. Why does the teacher not
accept the child’s excuse? Clearly it is because the
event would be too “unusual.” But why do we think
that way?
Let’s speculate that you survey a million adults, and only three
report that they have ever heard of a real case where a dog ate
somebody’s homework. You are a teacher, and a es
in without homework and says that a dog ate the homework.
It could have happened—your survey reports that it really has
happened in three lifetimes out of a million. But the event hap-
pens only very infrequently.
Therefore, you probably conclude that because the event is so
unlikely, something else must have happened—and the likeli-
est alternative is that the student did not do the homework.
The l