Moving college health research forward: Reconsidering our reliance on statistical significance testing.
J Am Coll Health
; 67(3): 181-188, 2019 04.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-29952723
ABSTRACT
Understanding the unique health needs of college students and establishing best practices to address them depend, heavily, on the inherent quality and contribution of the research identifying these needs. College health-focused publications currently exemplify less than ideal statistical reporting practices. Specifically, college health practitioners and researchers continue to rely heavily upon null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) as the sole standard for effectiveness, validity, and/or replicability of scientific studies, even though NHST itself was not designed for such purposes. Herein we address the following questions (a) What is NHST? (b) What are the inherent limitations of NHST? (c) What are recommended alternatives to NHST? and (d) How can editorial policies promote adopting NHST alternatives? Using college health data from the CORE 2011 Alcohol and Drug survey, we provide a heuristic example demonstrating how effect sizes do not suffer from the same limitations as NHST.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Student Health Services
/
Students
/
Universities
/
Data Interpretation, Statistical
/
Biomedical Research
Type of study:
Guideline
/
Prognostic_studies
Limits:
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Country/Region as subject:
America do norte
Language:
En
Journal:
J Am Coll Health
Year:
2019
Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
United States