What to do if your p-value is just over the arbitrary threshold for ‘significance’ of p=0.05?
http://mchankins.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/still-not-significant-2/
"You don’t need to play the significance testing game – there are better methods, like quoting the effect size with a confidence interval – but if you do, the rules are simple: the result is either significant or it is not.
So if your p-value remains stubbornly higher than 0.05, you should call it ‘non-significant’ and write it up as such. The problem for many authors is that this just isn’t the answer they were looking for: publishing so-called ‘negative results’ is harder than ‘positive results’.
The solution is to apply the time-honoured tactic of circumlocution to disguise the non-significant result as something more interesting. The following list is culled from peer-reviewed journal articles in which (a) the authors set themselves the threshold of 0.05 for significance, (b) failed to achieve that threshold value for p and (c) described it in such a way as to make it seem more interesting.
As well as being statistically flawed (results are either significant or not and can’t be qualified), the wording is linguistically interesting, often describing an aspect of the result that just doesn’t exist. For example, “a trend towards significance” expresses non-significance as some sort of motion towards significance, which it isn’t: there is no ‘trend’, in any direction, and nowhere for the trend to be ‘towards’."
http://mchankins.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/still-not-significant-2/
"You don’t need to play the significance testing game – there are better methods, like quoting the effect size with a confidence interval – but if you do, the rules are simple: the result is either significant or it is not.
So if your p-value remains stubbornly higher than 0.05, you should call it ‘non-significant’ and write it up as such. The problem for many authors is that this just isn’t the answer they were looking for: publishing so-called ‘negative results’ is harder than ‘positive results’.
The solution is to apply the time-honoured tactic of circumlocution to disguise the non-significant result as something more interesting. The following list is culled from peer-reviewed journal articles in which (a) the authors set themselves the threshold of 0.05 for significance, (b) failed to achieve that threshold value for p and (c) described it in such a way as to make it seem more interesting.
As well as being statistically flawed (results are either significant or not and can’t be qualified), the wording is linguistically interesting, often describing an aspect of the result that just doesn’t exist. For example, “a trend towards significance” expresses non-significance as some sort of motion towards significance, which it isn’t: there is no ‘trend’, in any direction, and nowhere for the trend to be ‘towards’."
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