Like many others, I was aware that there was controversy over null-hypothesis statistical testing. Nevertheless, I was shocked to learn that leading figures in the American Statistical Association (ASA) recently called for abolishing the term “statistical significance”. In an editorial in the ASA’s flagship journal, The American Statistician, Ronald Wasserstein, Allen Schirm, and Nicole Lazar write: “Based on our review of the articles in this special issue and the broader literature, we conclude that it is time to stop using the term ‘statistically significant’ entirely.
[Note: This blog is based on our articles “Blinding Us to the Obvious? The Effect of Statistical Training on the Evaluation of Evidence” (Management Science, 2016) and “Statistical Significance and the Dichotomization of Evidence” (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2017).] Introduction The null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) paradigm is the dominant statistical paradigm in the biomedical and social sciences.