In statistics, a little star next to a coefficient generally means that the result is statistically significant\u00a0at the p<.05 level. In English, this means that there is only\u00a0a 1 in 20 chance that the finding just\u00a0popped up by pure random chance.\u00a0In sociology, that’s generally considered good enough to conclude that the finding is “real.”<\/p>\n
If one investigates a lot of relationships, however,\u00a0this way of deciding which ones\u00a0to claim as real has an obvious pitfall. \u00a0If you look at 20 possible but false relationships, chances are that one of them will be statistically significant by chance alone. Do enough fishing in a dead lake, in other words, and you’ll inevitably pull up some garbage.<\/p>\n
Thanks xkcd<\/a>, for making this funny.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In statistics, a little star next to a coefficient generally means that the result is statistically significant\u00a0at the p<.05 level. In English, this means that there is only\u00a0a 1 in 20 chance that the finding just\u00a0popped up by pure random chance.\u00a0In sociology, that’s generally considered good enough to conclude that the finding is “real.” If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":64315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[209,274],"class_list":["post-64314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-methodsuse-of-data"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/09\/1-36.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64314"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71690,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64314\/revisions\/71690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}