PSU 016, Section 550: Statistics First-Year Seminar
Fall 2006
Steps in a hypothesis test:
- State assumptions
- State null and alternative hypotheses
- Collect data and summarize in a test statistic
- Calculate p-value
- Decide whether p-value is small enough to reject the null hypothesis
p-value:The hypothetical probability of observing a
test statistic at least as extreme as the one actually observed, assuming
that the null hypothesis is true.
Rejecting the null hypothesis:
If the p-value is smaller than .05, then we say that the result is statistically significant at
the .05 level (i.e., we reject the null hypothesis at the .05 level).
The number .05 may be replaced by some other small value, such as .01 or .001