Statistically significant

Statistical significance is a term used in statistics to denote the likelihood that a relationship between two or more variables is caused by something other than chance. Statistical hypothesis testing is traditionally employed to determine if a result is statistically significant or not.

Definition

Statistical significance is used to accept or reject the null hypothesis. This is done by looking at the p-value. If the p-value is less than or equal to the level of significance, it suggests that the observed data is inconsistent with the assumption that the null hypothesis is true and thus that hypothesis is rejected. However, this does not automatically mean that the alternative hypothesis can be accepted.

Misunderstandings

Statistical significance does not imply importance or practical significance. Many tests will yield statistically significant results when large samples are used, even though the results may not be practically significant.

See also

• Effect size
• Statistical power
• Type I and type II errors
• Null hypothesis
• P-value

References

Statistically significant Resources
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