When ‘significant’ is not significant
Rachel Kennedy, John Scriven and Magda Nenycz-Thiel
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia
Introduction
In terms of statistics, a ‘significant’ result means that we are confident at some level of certainty determined by the analyst, e.g. 95%, that the finding really did (or did not) occur in the population being measured, and that it was not just a quirk of the particular sample we happen to have drawn. Such understanding of the word ‘significant’ is very different from the lay term of significance as something meaningful, sufficiently great...