Effects, Power, Meta-Analysis. 1 Credit Hour

Catalog description

Evaluating the statistical significance of research findings requires knowledge of statistics, but additional skills are needed to evaluate their importance. This course introduces tools that help answer three questions: 1) How do I assess the practical or everyday significance of my research results, 2) Does my study have sufficient power to find what I am seeking, and 3) How do I draw conclusions from past studies reporting disparate results. Answering these questions involves estimation of effect size, calculation of statistical power, and pooling of individual effect size estimates by meta-analysis. This course discusses these activities together, because they are interrelated. A well-designed study is normally based on a prospective power analysis, and a good power analysis will ideally be based on a meta-analytically derived mean effect size. There is a growing recognition by scientific journals and funding agencies of the need to report effect sizes along with the results of test of statistical significance and to quantify the statistical power of studies. The aim of this course is to help acquire the skills necessary to meet these needs. This micro-elective builds on the significance-testing and power analytic skills that students learn in CSAT 5095 Experimental Design and Data Analysis. Thus, having taken CSAT 5095 is a prerequisite for this course.