My colleague Brooks Henderson alerted me to this new policy by the editors of the Basic and Applied Psychology (BASP) journal to ban the NHSTP. According to the editorial in their Feb 2015 issue, authors must remove all p-values and the like and not refer to “significant” differences. They also banned confidence intervals, which really makes this new policy onerous, in my opinion.
I do see the sense of focusing on effect sizes and allowing the readers, presumably subject matter experts, to judge their importance. However, although they do “encourage the the use of larger sample sizes”, it makes no sense, I feel, to disregard the impact of small studies on the uncertainty of the results.
Blaming the misuse of NHTSP and p-values in particular for bad science is like letting a bad guy go by saying the gun is at fault.
#1 by Eric Kvaalen on April 4, 2015 - 12:40 pm
I agree with you. This is terrible. It’s like they’re throwing out all the benefit of statistics. I have often advocated the opposite — that people SHOULD give confidence limits and p-values instead of just reporting the size of an effect, or saying that it was “significant” (by which they usually mean p<0.05).
#2 by Brooks Henderson on April 29, 2015 - 4:35 pm
Agreed. Large sample sizes are good, but when smaller ones are used the statistics are needed for protection.