Categories: Site glossary
a result which reaches statistical significance, and so is taken to probably not be just a chance effect, that occurs by chance. The use of inferential statistics means that is is inevitable that some positive results in studies are false positives
The occurrence of false positives can be reduced by using a more restrictive confidence level as a criterion of significance (e.g., p <0.01) but this increases the frequency of false negatives
[Please be aware that a word may have different nuances, or even a different meaning, according to context.]« Back to Index
