p<0.05?????

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p<0.05?????
Message posted by Nancy Pelligrino on November 11, 1999 at 12:00 AM (ET)

I need a site that can tell me basics
of stats. Like what p<0.05 means, what
a Dunnett's test is, ANOVAs? I read scientific papers and
have no idea what the basics mean and where they come from.
Help.

READERS RESPOND:
(In chronological order. Most recent at the bottom.)

Re: p<0.05?????
Message posted by JG on November 11, 1999 at 12:00 AM (ET)

You should begin by going to the library or book store and getting the simplest book that you find useful. Used bookstore are nice. Also libraries often sell their somewhat outofdate books for practically nothing - these books are still useful and may even be better than more recent books.
If you are looking for a web site, check out some of the links on or do a search for "statistical glossary", "interactive statistics", etc.

Re: p<0.05?????
Message posted by Phil Rosenkrantz on November 13, 1999 at 12:00 AM (ET)

Your questions are somewhat advanced. I don't cover p-values and ANOVA until near the end of the first course in statistics.

However, here is a try at those two. p<.05 refers to hypothesis testing. We often conjecture about some property of a population like its average or spread. We then make a hypothesis and conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis. p<.05 means that our test will (or did) accidently reject a correct hypothesis due to random error less than 5% of the time.

ANOVA is another sampling procedure where you can explore the significance of a variety of factors at once. You may suspect, for example, that five different factors affect a response of some kind. ANOVA may help you discover that only two factors and their interaction may be the only significant factors. That could be valuable information.

Hope that helps. I assumed from your message you probably haven't had a statistics course in a long time. If the answers were to basic, I apologize.

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