Formal empirical assessments of replication have recently become more prominent in several areas of science, including psychology. These assessments have used different statistical approaches to determine if a finding has been replicated. The purpose of this article is to provide several alternative conceptual frameworks that lead to different…

Structured means analysis is a very useful approach for testing hypotheses about population means on latent constructs. In such models, a z test is most commonly used for testing the statistical significance of the relevant parameter estimates or of the differences between parameter estimates, where a z value is computed based on the asymptotic…

Recently, Stephen Gorard has outlined strong objections to the use of significance testing in social research. He has argued, first, that as the samples used in social research are almost always non-random it is not possible to use inferential statistical techniques and, second, that even if a truly random sample were achieved, the logic behind…

As result replicability is essential to science and difficult to achieve through external replicability, the present paper notes the insufficiency of null hypothesis statistical significance testing (NHSST) and explains the bootstrap as a plausible alternative, with a heuristic example to illustrate the bootstrap method. The bootstrap relies on…

There is currently a considerable diversity of quantitative measures available for summarizing the results in single-case studies. Given that the interpretation of some of them is difficult due to the lack of established benchmarks, the current article proposes an approach for obtaining further numerical evidence on the importance of the results,…

The purpose of this systematic review was to investigate the weight of scientific evidence regarding student outcomes (physical, cognitive and affective) of a Game Centered Approach (GCA) when the quality of a study was taken into account in the interpretation of collective findings. A systematic search of five electronic databases (Sports…

Agricultural education teachers' attitudes about the perceptions of diversity inclusion in their programs are variables that may have a strong influence on the number of students that enroll in agricultural education. This study examines the effect of teachers' demographic and personal characteristics on their perceptions of the benefits of…

The aim of the current study is to validate the invariance of major profile patterns derived from multidimensional scaling (MDS) by bootstrapping. Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling (PAMS) was employed to obtain profiles and bootstrapping was used to construct the sampling distributions of the profile coordinates and the empirical…

This report describes patterns of continuity and change over time in four areas of the transition to adulthood among young adults as measured 2 years after their senior year of high school. The four areas are postsecondary enrollment, labor force roles, family formation, and civic engagement through voting or military service. The analysis…

Multiple regression is commonly used in social and behavioral data analysis. In multiple regression contexts, researchers are very often interested in determining the "best" predictors in the analysis. This focus may stem from a need to identify those predictors that are supportive of theory. Alternatively, the researcher may simply be interested…

It is a false, but common, belief that statistical significance testing evaluates result replicability. In truth, statistical significance testing reveals nothing about results replicability. Since science is based on replication of results, methods that assess replicability are important. This is particularly true when multivariate methods, which…

Describes MINSIZE, an MS-DOS computer program that permits the user to determine the minimum sample size needed for the results of a given analysis to be statistically significant. Program applications for statistical significance tests are presented and illustrated. (SLD)

The use of and emphasis on statistical significance testing has pervaded educational and behavioral research for many decades in spite of criticism by prominent researchers in this field. Much of the controversy is caused by lack of understanding or misinterpretations. This paper reviews criticisms of statistical significance testing and discusses…

Practical significance is concerned with whether a research result is useful in the real world. The use of procedures to supplement the null hypothesis significance test in four journals of the American Psychological Association is examined, and an approach to assessing practical significance is presented. (SLD)

An Edgeworth approximation for accurate significance probabilities for the Wilcoxon two-sample test is substantially simplified. A method is developed that allows quick calculations of very accurate probabilities. Exact formulas are given for most of the remaining cases, and tables are presented comparing the new simplification to likely…