When (not) to trust the overlap in confidence intervals: A practical guide
Exeter Q-Step/NCRM Summer Research Methods Seminar Series, by Dr Denis Cohen from University of Mannheim
Researchers often aim to compare estimates across groups. For an intuitive and compact presentation of empirical results, many practitioners prefer reporting group-specific estimates instead of pairwise differences, and subsequently seek to infer the statistical significance of pairwise differences from the confidence intervals of the group-specific estimates.
| The University of Exeter Q-Step Centre seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 12 May 2021 |
| Time | 14:00 to 15:00 |
| Place | Online |
Event details
Following the insight that an overlap in the 95% confidence intervals of two estimates does not imply the statistical insignificance of their pairwise difference, practitioners now increasingly turn to 83.4% confidence intervals. However, the use of 83.4% confidence intervals rests on stringent assumptions which fail to hold in most social science applications. This not only opens the door to fallacious inferences but also to the deliberate manipulation of statistical evidence. This article proposes a viable alternative: Lower triangular visualizations, which allow for compact combinations of group-specific estimates with accurate information on the statistical significance of pairwise differences even when the number of groups is large.
This seminar will be delivered online. Register your details here to receive a link to the live session on the day: https://forms.office.com/r/EbrFXxKjCn.
Please note the link to the registration form can trigger an alert reminding you of the risks of sharing personal information. The form is created and controlled by the University of Exeter, and the information you provide is used to communicate booking details with you.
