POLS 3650 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Point Estimation, Confidence Interval, Type I And Type Ii Errors

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLS 3650
• Professor: Edward Koning

Document Summary

What is statistical significance: whenever we use a sample to generalize about a population, we need to exclude the possibility that our findings are the product of sampling error. This means we can use the insight of the clt to calculate the probability that our. If our sample is random, than the sampling error will be random as well findings were produced entirely by chance. If we feel we can safely exclude that possibility, we call our findings statistically significant: we express statistical significance as the probability (p) that we would reach the same conclusions under the condition of randomness. It is not the probability that the findings are the result of randomness. It is not an indicator of how large or important our findings are. Philosophical reason: fundamental problem of induction; falsification is safer than verification. Mathematical/logical reason: it is impossible to calculate the probability of hi.