(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Jonathan Falk points me to an amusing post by Matthew Hankins giving synonyms for “not statistically significant.” Hankins writes:
The following list is culled from peer-reviewed journal articles in which (a) the authors set themselves the threshold of 0.05 for significance, (b) failed to achieve that threshold value for p and (c) described it in such a way as to make it seem more interesting.
And here are some examples:
slightly significant (p=0.09)
sufficiently close to significance (p=0.07)
trending towards significance (p>0.15)
trending towards significant (p=0.099)
vaguely significant (p>0.2)
verged on being significant (p=0.11)
verging on significance (p=0.056)
weakly statistically significant (p=0.0557)
well-nigh significant (p=0.11)
Lots more at the link.
This is great, but I do disagree with one thing in the post, which is where Hankins writes: “if you do [play the significance testing game], the rules are simple: the result is either significant or it isn’t.”
I don’t like this; I think the idea that it’s a “game” with wins and losses is a big part of the problem! More on this point in our “power = .06″ post.
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