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International Journal of Epidemiology 2003;32:693-694
© International Epidemiological Association 2003

Reprints and Reflections

Commentary: Null points—has interpretation of significance tests improved?

Jonathan Sterne

Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Canynge Hall, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2PR, UK. E-mail: jonathan.sterne@bristol.ac.uk

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

Perhaps the most striking impression gained in reading Berkson’s piece,1 more than 60 years since its publication, is the author’s struggle with questions of interpretation that still plague those conducting and interpreting statistical analyses today. Berkson seems to make little progress with solutions to the problems he presents, so it is of interest to see how statisticians today might deal with them.

A P-value (significance level) is used to assess evidence against a null hypothesis. If, as Berkson states, we do not ‘find experimentalists typically engaged in disproving things’ then why does the formulation of statistical questions in terms of null hypotheses and their falsification remain so pervasive? Of course, the idea of science as a process of falsification was articulated in detail by Popper, and remains an attractive explanation of why, for example, Newton’s laws of mechanics . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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