Arbeitspapier

The cult of statistical significance

This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present article argues that this is good advice in some research areas but not in others. Taking all issues which have appeared so far of the German Economic Review and a recent epidemiological meta-analysis as examples, it shows that there has indeed been a lot of misleading work in the context of significance testing, and that at the same time many promising avenues for fruitfully employing statistical significance tests, disregarded by Ziliak and McCloskey, have not been used.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 3246

Classification
Wirtschaft
General Economics and Teaching
Subject
significance testing
Statistischer Test
Kritik
Statistische Methodenlehre
Theorie

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Krämer, Walter
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
(where)
Munich
(when)
2010

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Krämer, Walter
  • Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)

Time of origin

  • 2010

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