Testing For Differences
In scientific and medical research, null hypotheses play a major role in testing the significance of differences in treatment and control groups. This use, while widespread, offers several grounds for criticism, including straw man, Bayesian criticism and publication bias.
The typical null hypothesis at the outset of the experiment is that no difference exists between the control and experimental groups (for the variable being compared). Other possibilities include:
- that values in samples from a given population can be modeled using a certain family of statistical distributions.
- that the variability of data in different groups is the same, although they may be centered around different values.
Read more about this topic: Null Hypothesis
Famous quotes containing the words testing and/or differences:
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)