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Statistics : A Important Application For Psychology

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Statistics is a very important application used in psychology. Statistics allows for researchers to make inferences, causal conclusions, and find relationships between variables. Many measures and tests account for the wide range of statistical tools a researcher can use to present data they have collected. Some of the ones more widely used in psychology are the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-tests. Other key statistical points used in explaining relationships between variables, used to interpret data results, and making causal conclusions are statistical significance and Pearson’s R. Both of these help to explain correlations and relationships between two or more variables. To start, one must understand what statistical significance is and what it means to research. Simply stated statistical significance occurs when the p-value is less than the significance level. Before starting research, one must decide what to set the significance level to. The significance level is the amount of type 1 error in a test or the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis on the assumption it is true. The significance level in psychological research is usually set to 0.05%. The p-value is the measurement, when assuming the null hypothesis is true, of an observable effect. Statistical significance is very important to hypothesis testing because it eliminates possibilities that sampling error may cause the observed effect being measured. If the p-value is less than or

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