[tips] NHST banned? ASA To The Rescue!

[Mike Palij]

Previously on TiPS, the policy change by the editors
of the journal "Basic and Applied Social Psychology"
(BASP) to ban Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing (NHST)
or to make believe it doesn't exist by allowing authors
to do statistical tests but not report them in their articles
has been discussed as it has been in many other forums.
Regardless of one's views on the policy change (i.e., a
brilliant strategy to minimize the alleged damage done
by NHST [Geoff Cumming being one advocate of this
position] or a move by knuckleheads in order to draw
attention to journal that could use a boost in circulation),
the American Statistical Association has decided that it
must provide an official statement on BASP's policy as
well as any other journal's potential shift in that direction.
However, making such a statement will take time so, for now,
here is their statement of intent:
http://community.amstat.org/blogs/ronald-wasserstein/2015/02/26/asa-comment-on-a-journals-ban-on-null-hypothesis-statistical-testing

Quoting from the statement:

|The ASA encourages the editors of this journal and others
|who might share their concerns to consider what is offered
|in the ASA statement to appear later this year and not
|discard the proper and appropriate use of statistical inference.

Of course, psychologists being the brilliant statistical wizards
that they are, will probably ignore what the ASA says (after all,
the ASA ignores the APA and doesn't follow APA style for its
journals ;-).  But in the meantime, BASP will probably have
benefited from the attention -- considering that there is no such
thing as bad advertising. ;-)

-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu


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Re: [tips] NHST banned? ASA To The Rescue!

[Claudia Stanny]

What are they thinking?

For all its shortcomings, NHST at least spares us from the self-promoting
individuals who are willing to interpret a difference between 42.1967 and
42.1972 and a "trend" that supports their pet hypothesis.

Just wait til the junk scientists get their hands on this as a legitimate
practice. What fun. Let's bring back the apricot pit treatments for
leukemia! Evidence that vaccines do induce autism (some small difference
between rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated kids). Yippee!

I'm with ASA on this one.

_

Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D.
Director
Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL  32514

Phone:   (850) 857-6355 (direct) or  473-7435 (CUTLA)

csta...@uwf.edu

CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/offices/cutla/ 
Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 9:38 AM, Mike Palij  wrote:

> Previously on TiPS, the policy change by the editors
> of the journal "Basic and Applied Social Psychology"
> (BASP) to ban Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing (NHST)
> or to make believe it doesn't exist by allowing authors
> to do statistical tests but not report them in their articles
> has been discussed as it has been in many other forums.
> Regardless of one's views on the policy change (i.e., a
> brilliant strategy to minimize the alleged damage done
> by NHST [Geoff Cumming being one advocate of this
> position] or a move by knuckleheads in order to draw
> attention to journal that could use a boost in circulation),
> the American Statistical Association has decided that it
> must provide an official statement on BASP's policy as
> well as any other journal's potential shift in that direction.
> However, making such a statement will take time so, for now,
> here is their statement of intent:
> http://community.amstat.org/blogs/ronald-wasserstein/2015/
> 02/26/asa-comment-on-a-journals-ban-on-null-hypothesis-statistical-testing
>
> Quoting from the statement:
>
> |The ASA encourages the editors of this journal and others
> |who might share their concerns to consider what is offered
> |in the ASA statement to appear later this year and not
> |discard the proper and appropriate use of statistical inference.
>
> Of course, psychologists being the brilliant statistical wizards
> that they are, will probably ignore what the ASA says (after all,
> the ASA ignores the APA and doesn't follow APA style for its
> journals ;-).  But in the meantime, BASP will probably have
> benefited from the attention -- considering that there is no such
> thing as bad advertising. ;-)
>
> -Mike Palij
> New York University
> m...@nyu.edu
>
>
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RE:[tips] NHST banned?

[Mike Palij]

Let me make a few points:

(1) I have respect for Karl W., Pat S. and Jack C.  I just
don't agree with everything they say.  I hope that I am
not too disagreeable in my disagreements with them
(well, maybe not with Pat but that's another story).

(2) My first reaction to John Kulig's post (down below)
was to decide whether I should laugh or cry.  Let's be
clear about what the editorial for the journal "Basic
and Applied Social Psychology" says because to say
that it bans NHST is an oversimplification.

(a) NO INFERENTIAL TESTS WILL BE ALLOWED.
The editorial is structured into Question-Answer format
and I quote the first question-answer here:

|Question 1. Will manuscripts with p-values be desk
|rejected automatically?
|Answer to Question 1. No. If manuscripts pass the
|preliminary inspection, they will be sent out for review.
|But prior to publication, authors will have to remove all
|vestiges of the NHSTP (p-values, t-values, F-values,
|statements about ''significant'' differences or lack
|thereof, and so on).

I don't know if this makes Karl happy or not because it is
the "reverse discrimination" that he experienced but one
has to ask "Is it really the case that all inferential statistical
tests are invalid or bad?"  What about permutation tests?
How will we know is a difference is due to systematic
effects or sampling error?  What would Frederic Lord's
statistician do, the one who performed a statistical test
on the numbers of college football jerseys in order to
determine whether freshman had systematic lower numbers
than the seniors?  He is now in violation of Stevens and
the editors Trafimow and Marks!  What to do?

(b) NO CONFIDENCE INTERVALS OR BAYESIAN ANALYSIS.
It should be obvious that confidence intervals suffer from whatever
problems one wants to claim about NHST (see the argument
made in the editorial as well as elsewhere) and Bayesian
analysis should be prohibited for reasons that only Bayesian
care about (trust me on this point; one historical point that
few people make is that both Fisher and Neyman rejected
Bayesian methods -- a popular position during the 19th century
and first half of the 20th century -- and attempts to resurrect it
may succeed only in limited situations where the assumptions
are met, a position that applies also the Fisherian and Neyman
approaches).

(c) NO INFERENTIAL STATISTICAL PROCEDURES WILL BE
REQUIRED.
This point will probably be cheered most by researchers who
couldn't do inferential statistics if their lives depended upon.
Now the editors, David Trafimow and Michael Marks, say that
this should NOT make it easy to publish in "Basic and Applied
Social Psychology" but they really do not indicate how the
rigor will be assessed?  Will researchers be required to
specify the probability distributions that their measurement
come from because this would determine which descriptive
statistics are most important to report (as well as explaining
why the probability distribution is appropriate)? I have no doubt
that many researchers will attempt to publish the worst kind of
crap research in this journal because the word will be out that
"the journal doesn't require statistical analysis!!!"  This would
be comparable to the belief of a woman I knew back when I
was an undergraduate who said that she was applying only
to one psychology graduate program because they only taught
Bayesian statistics in the grad stat course and "Bayesian was
all subjective and not mathematical".  Boy, was she surprised.

I have no problem with purely descriptive or observational
research as long as it was planned as such -- Jane Goodall's
work with chimpanzees serves as a prototypical example.
However, manipulating variables in experimental or quasi-experimental
designs and then reporting just descriptive statistics is just
plain stupid.  It is as though the editors either don't want researchers
to distinguish between systematic differences and difference
due to random factor or sampling error.

(3) I consider this policy as dumb as Geoff Loftus' policy to enforce
only the use of confidence intervals while he was editor of the
journal "Memory and Cognition".  The policy was eventually
abandoned and I'm willing to start a pool to predict what year
the above policy is significantly modified or abandoned.
I leave it to someone who cares to explain the comparable
stupidity of the ASP journals requiring P-rep in results sections,
that is, until it was realized that P-rep didn't really do what people
thought it did.

(4) There are a few people around today who consider themselves
"Neo-Fisherians" because they base their statistical analysis on
a form of the original Fisherian inferential framework instead of
the Neyman-Pearson framework which, when it comes right down
to it, makes some pretty unreasonable assumptions (e.g., the
basis for using confidence intervals is the belief that if one, say,
replicated an experiment 100 times and one used a 95%CI,
then 95% of the intervals would contain the populat

RE:[tips] NHST banned?

[Wuensch, Karl L]

 Every time I have tried to publish a research manuscript without p values 
(but with effect size confidence intervals) I have been instructed to provide p 
values.  It is as if it is not real science if there are not p values.



 NHST (or, as Cohen quipped, SHIT) was banned by the American Journal 
of Public Health way back in the 80's.  There have been previous attempts to do 
the same in Psychology, with little effect [that is, the confidence interval 
may exclude zero but both ends are pretty close to zero :-) ].



 Background reading:



Shrout, P. E.  (1997).  Should significance tests be banned?  Introduction to a 
special section exploring the pros and cons.  Psychological Science, 8, 1-2.



Fidler, F., Thomason, N., Cumming, G., Finch, S., & Leeman, J.  (2004).  
Editors can lead researchers to confidence intervals, but can't make them 
think.  Psychological Science, 15, 119-126.


Cheers,
Karl W.
From: John Kulig [mailto:ku...@mail.plymouth.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:04 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: [tips] NHST banned?


 FYI:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973533.2015.1012991#.VOxksXZ=

The journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology!

==
John W. Kulig, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Coordinator, Psychology Honors
Plymouth State University
Plymouth NH 03264
==


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[tips] NHST banned?

[John Kulig]

FYI: 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973533.2015.1012991#.VOxksXZ= 

The journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology! 

== 
John W. Kulig, Ph.D. 
Professor of Psychology 
Coordinator, Psychology Honors 
Plymouth State University 
Plymouth NH 03264 
== 

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