Question 30 of 30 Explain in your own words the logic of statistical significance - Essay Example

Answer Statistical significance is a term that is commonly employed in the probability statistics. The logic of statistical significance can best be explained with the help of an example. Let’s suppose a student tells the teacher that he could not submit the homework because it was eaten by a cat. The teacher refuses to accept this excuse because it is too unlikely to happen. Let’s suppose that the teacher surveys a million children, and out of them, only two say that the event happened. While this could happen, it actually happened with no more than two children in a million.

This means that even if it does, it happens very infrequently, thus leading the teacher to the conclusion that since the event occurs so infrequently, the child is probably lying and the most probable thing that must have happened is that the child never did the homework. The child’s explanation is statistically insignificant since the probability of occurrence of such incidents is very less, if any. “Although tests of statistical significance are widely reported in criminal justice literature, the logic underlying them is subtle and often misunderstood” (2011, p. 292). The logic here is that very unlikely events like a cat eating a child’s homework surprise teachers greatly and so the teachers tend to think of a better explanation.

It is hard to depict which level of significance is significant. There has to be a sufficiently large coincidence to assume that the matter under consideration is not simply a mere coincidence.References:(2011). Interpreting Data. Chapter 11. Cengage Learning.