8) A researcher conducted an experiment on whether people who own dogs are more

Question

8) A researcher conducted an experiment on whether people who own dogs are more likely to spend Saturday nights at home. The researcher asked both dog owners and people who do not own dogs (360 participants in total) whether they went out last Saturday night (yes or no). The researcher found that 63% of dog owners reported staying at home last Saturday night and 57% of people who do not own dogs reported staying at home last Saturday night. The researcher conducted a chi-square analysis and found a test statistic of 2 (1) = 1.03, p = .072. Is the difference between dog owners and people who do not own dogs statistically significant? How do you know?

Explanation / Answer

To know whether the difference is statistically significant we have to take a look at the null and alternative hypothesis.

Null Hypothesis : There is no difference between dog owners and people who do not own dogs.

Alternative Hypothesis : There is significant difference between dog owners and people who don't own dogs.

The P-value which is given here is the probability that a result as extreme as null hypothesis can occur. We often set some criteria of significance level (say 5% or 0.05) to determine if the result is significant. So, when we carry out the analysis we say that at this significance level the difference is statistically significant/not significant.

If we consider 5% significance level, then the P-value (0.072) is greater than significance level (0.05). Thus we fail to reject the null hypothesis since the P-value is not less than our set criteria. Therefore the difference is not statistically significant.

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