Translating Statistics to Make Decisions: A Guide for the Non-Statistician

© Victoria Cox 2017

Victoria Cox, Translating Statistics to Make Decisions , 10.1007/978-1-4842-2256-0_6

6. Hypothesis Testing

What Differences Are in the Data?

Victoria Cox¹ 

(1)Dstl, Salisbury, UK

Hypothesis testing involves looking for significant differences within the sample of data you have, with significant being the important word here. It is easy to see if there has been a difference in results, between two sets of data for example, however hypothesis testing is used to determine if the difference is likely to be due to chance or likely to be a real effect in the population.

The idea of what hypothesis testing is doing is quite simple to understand, however the exact definition, the number of tests available for use, and the correct and incorrect ...