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Vignette 1. Dr. D is a researcher interested in the connections between video game playing and grades in school. He forms two groups the Problem Gamers and the Non-Problem Gamers. Dr. D’s null hypothesis is that there is no difference in the GPA of the two groups. After gathering loads of data, Dr. D is ready to compute his statistical analyses. After crunching the numbers he confidently announces that Problem Gamers do much poorer in school and therefor he rejects his null hypothesis. However, he was unaware that a computer virus caused a significant error in his computations and in fact there is no difference between the GPA of the Problem Gamers and the Non-Problem Gamers.
Because we are constantly inferring results from a sample to a population, inferential statistics inherently have error. This error is related to the hypothesis…