Question

Describe how inference works. That is, why can we use statistics to talk about behavioral phenomena? What does it mean to have a statistically significant finding?

Answer 1

Inference is all about drawing conclusions about population using the information from the sample. Now this information can be simply used to accept or reject a claim or hypothesis which we assume and test for our population.

In order to accept / reject, we use the population distribution to obtain a suitable statistic. Then find out the p value that is used to measure the probability of obtaining a value as extreme as the statistic when null hypothesis is true.

If p - value comes out to be very low then it sheds a doubt on the null hypothesis and the finding is statistically significant.

In other words if p<0.05 then it means that there is low probability of obtaining a statistic as large as the one obtained if the null hypothesis is true.

This means that the finding is statistically significant and we reject the null hypothesis.