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Based on the criticisms of null hypothesis testing, diagnose how Dr. Vance's conclusions show a misunderstanding of her results and explain why her reliance on rejecting the null hypothesis fails to provide key information about the variables in the population.
Case context: Dr. Vance conducts a study to investigate if a new mindfulness exercise reduces stress. After analyzing the data, she obtains a -value of and rejects the null hypothesis. She concludes that this result guarantees the mindfulness exercise is highly effective in the population and that this effect will replicate in future studies with high certainty. She does not report any other statistics or measures of effect size.
Question: Based on the criticisms of null hypothesis testing, diagnose how Dr. Vance's conclusions show a misunderstanding of her results and explain why her reliance on rejecting the null hypothesis fails to provide key information about the variables in the population.
Sample answer: Dr. Vance's conclusion shows a misunderstanding of results because a -value close to the arbitrary threshold of does not guarantee replication or prove the exercise is highly effective. Furthermore, simply rejecting the null hypothesis is of limited informativeness, as it provides very little actual information about the real relationship or strength of the effect between the mindfulness exercise and stress in the population.
Key points:
- Dr. Vance's conclusion demonstrates the criticism of researchers frequently misunderstanding null hypothesis testing results.
- A -value of is close to the boundary, showing the issues with using a rigid significance threshold.
- Rejecting the null hypothesis is criticized because it provides very little information about the actual relationship in the population.
Rubric: The response must explain: 1) that Dr. Vance's assumption of guaranteed replication and effect strength demonstrates a misunderstanding of -values and ignores the arbitrary nature of the threshold, and 2) that rejecting the null hypothesis itself is not very informative because it does not reveal the actual magnitude or details of the relationship between variables in the population.
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Research Methods in Psychology - 4th American Edition @ KPU
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