Document Type
Journal Article
Publisher
Frontiers Research Foundation
Place of Publication
Switzerland
Faculty
Faculty of Education and Arts
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
20290
Abstract
In an important theoretical article Speelman and McGann (2013) indicated that psychological researchers tend to use statistical procedures that involve calculating the mean of a variable in an uncritical manner. A typical procedure in psychological research consists of calculating the mean of some dependent variable in two or more samples and to present those means as summaries of the samples. The next step is to use some statistical technique (e.g., t -test, ANOVA) in order to be able to determine the probability of finding the observed differences between means in those samples given that the difference between the means of the populations from which the samples were extracted is zero. If this probability is very low (i.e., < 0.05) the psychological researcher decides that the difference between the means of the populations of interest is not zero.
DOI
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01379
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Campitelli, G. (2015). Answering research questions without calculating the mean. Frontiers in Psychology, 6(2015), 1379. Available here