5
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Robust misinterpretation of confidence intervals.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is undoubtedly the most common inferential technique used to justify claims in the social sciences. However, even staunch defenders of NHST agree that its outcomes are often misinterpreted. Confidence intervals (CIs) have frequently been proposed as a more useful alternative to NHST, and their use is strongly encouraged in the APA Manual. Nevertheless, little is known about how researchers interpret CIs. In this study, 120 researchers and 442 students-all in the field of psychology-were asked to assess the truth value of six particular statements involving different interpretations of a CI. Although all six statements were false, both researchers and students endorsed, on average, more than three statements, indicating a gross misunderstanding of CIs. Self-declared experience with statistics was not related to researchers' performance, and, even more surprisingly, researchers hardly outperformed the students, even though the students had not received any education on statistical inference whatsoever. Our findings suggest that many researchers do not know the correct interpretation of a CI. The misunderstandings surrounding p-values and CIs are particularly unfortunate because they constitute the main tools by which psychologists draw conclusions from data.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Psychon Bull Rev
          Psychonomic bulletin & review
          Springer Nature
          1531-5320
          1069-9384
          Oct 2014
          : 21
          : 5
          Affiliations
          [1 ] University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, r.hoekstra@rug.nl.
          Article
          10.3758/s13423-013-0572-3
          24420726
          c0e66141-114a-469d-8687-fa57675f78cb
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article