Level of Significance Examples

Few examples to illustrate the concept of level of significance:

Educational Research

• Researchers are looking into if a newly adopted teaching approach has a positive effect on the student’s success at the level of mathematics. These participants selected the level of significance of α = 0.10. However, following data analysis the coefficient of their study gives a p-value of 0.15 which is used to test the difference in performance of the students. Thus, as the p-value is greater than the significance level of 0.10, the researchers cannot reject its null hypothesis. Therefore, one could not claim that student performance with the two teaching methods shows the statistically different outcomes.

Medical Research

• Testing a new medication’s capacity to treat a specific condition is the mode of work for researchers in an experimental study. They will evaluate the statistical results with α = 0.05. Once the data are analyzed the associated p-value is seen to be 0.03. The fact that the calculated p-value is smaller than the specified value of p (i.e., 0.05) proves that the effect of the drug is indeed statistically significant; the researchers accept this condition, and they reject the null hypothesis; the hypothesis being that the drug is not effective.
• If p-value is equal to 0.03, then this indicates that there are 3% chances of getting a difference larger than that in our research, given that the null hypothesis exists.

Level of significance or Statistical significance is an important terminology used in Statistics. Level of significance is the measurement of the statistical significance. The level of significance explains whether the null hypothesis is accepted or rejected. In this article, we are going to discuss the level of significance in detail.