- I agree with a couple of others, DeLa presents a bad idea. The
price being the same, MORE information is BETTER -
On Wed, 22 Mar 2000 13:59:19 GMT, "DeLa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> Well, I suppose that when the sample is too big almost every
> relation will prove to be "significant". A lot of
> pseudo-relations will occur. It will become difficult to detect
> intermediate(1) variables or neutralise them because there will
> be many candidates - if not all the variables will be
> intermediating in some way or another. You will need to have a
> lot of insight in the matter to distinguish between absurdities
> and relevant relations, which makes it difficult for 'the
> reader' to follow your analytical thinking and make the
> separation between logical statistical steps and interpretation.
< snip >
The comments above seem to assume that when you write the results, it
will be necessary or desirable to cite the usual p-levels, or the
trivial fact of meeting a cutoff for "significance". I surely hope
the good journals have better standards than that.
I remember a teacher telling me about writing up a large-sample health
survey, more than 20 years ago; for revisions, the New England Journal
of Medicine asked that they remove every statistical test or reference
to "statistical significance." Or, that's what he said -- I wondered,
later, if he may have exaggerated, to stress the point. But it was a
good point.
I hope that the researcher is not DEPENDING on p=0,05, in order to
"distinguish between absurdities and relevant relations".
--
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
===========================================================================
This list is open to everyone. Occasionally, less thoughtful
people send inappropriate messages. Please DO NOT COMPLAIN TO
THE POSTMASTER about these messages because the postmaster has no
way of controlling them, and excessive complaints will result in
termination of the list.
For information about this list, including information about the
problem of inappropriate messages and information about how to
unsubscribe, please see the web page at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
===========================================================================
