You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
General medicine
Best way not to misuse p values is not to draw definitive conclusions about hypotheses
  1. David Trafimow1,
  2. Usha Haley2,
  3. David Boje3
  1. 1 Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University, Mexico, New Mexico, USA
  2. 2 International Business and Management, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, USA
  3. 3 Management, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr David Trafimow, New Mexico State University, Mexico, NM 88003, USA; dtrafimo{at}nmsu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2022-111940

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    A recent article in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine asserted the following1, ‘We begin by saying that p values themselves are not flawed. Rather, the use, misuse or abuse of p values in ways antithetical to rigorous scientific pursuits is the flaw’. We show that this assertion is both wrong and misleading.

    To demonstrate the errors, we start with another wrong assertion on the same page: ‘The only information to be gleaned from p values is whether the observed data are likely where the null hypothesis (that no effect exists) [is] true’. This assertion erroneously assumes that p values are based on null hypotheses when instead they are based …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Twitter @uhaley

    • Contributors All authors conceptualised and wrote the manuscript and approved it in its final form.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.