On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, dennis roberts wrote:
> At 04:00 PM 4/7/00 -0500, Michael Granaas wrote:
>
> >But whatever form hypothesis testing takes it must first and formost be
> >viewed in the context of the question being asked.
>
>
> this seems to be the key to REinventing ourselves ... make sure the focus
> is on the question ... AND, to REshape the question FROM what we
> traditionally do in hyp test ...
If you look at Psychology you might well see two traditions, one in which
the zero valued null is used in a rather automatic and mindless fashion
and another in which researchers work very hard setting up experiments
where rejection of the zero valued null does provide some information.
>
> set up the null, etc. etc
>
> to ... ask the question of real interest ...
>
> what effect DOES this new treatment have?
> what kind of correlation IS there between X and Y?
In the second tradition I spoke of you find people asking exactly these
types of questions once they have established that their experimental
results are not due to chance. They use the hypothesis test as a step on
the road to understanding, not as an end in and of itself.
To me this second group acts more like model fitters (emphasis on
prediction) than they do like hypothesis testers (emphasis on rejecting
nil effects). Even though this second group rejects some nil valued
hypothesis they, unlike the first, ask questions about things like effect
size or functional form of an effect rather than simply declaring the
effect is not zero and drawing some final conclusion.
For myself I try to get students at all levels asking the types of
questions that Dennis suggests as being obvious follow-ups to rejecting
some nil hypothesis. I cannot claim a great deal of success, but I am
trying.
> what IS the difference between the smartness of democrats and republicans?
>
> if you ask questions that way ... they do not naturally or sensibly lead to
> our testing the typical null hypotheses we set up
Yes. There are a variety of answers to this problem, but, rejecting the
no difference hypothesis when it is a priori false is not among them.
Michael
>
*******************************************************************
Michael M. Granaas
Associate Professor [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Psychology
University of South Dakota Phone: (605) 677-5295
Vermillion, SD 57069 FAX: (605) 677-6604
*******************************************************************
All views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of the University of South Dakota, or the South
Dakota Board of Regents.
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