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Can someone provide a valid definition or explanation of the concept "significant main effect"?
I am not a lazy student or an inept practitioner, but I have to read a lot of social science literature and keep running across this phrase. I am long out of school and this didn't come up in my required psych course. I have not been able to find a clear explanation of how a "significant main effect" is established or supported by data. From context I have begun to get the feeling that researchers report a significant main effect when none of the tested hypothesis are supported ... ( I know that sounds cynical - but it is just an impression) and I still don't know where is comes from statistically or in relation to the study design. Can anyone explain, especially anyone with some credentials or a cited source?
I guess this is more of a general social science than only psych...
2 Answers
- hork2004Lv 41 decade agoFavorite Answer
In Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) a main effec refers to a difference in population means for a given factor collapsed over the levels of all other factors in the design.
the term significant refers to the notion that the result revealed from one's analysis (in this case the main effect of the given variable) was has a less than 5% chance of resulting from pure chance alone (i.e. not really representative of the different groups). or in other words we can say with 95% confidence that the main effect observed was real.
you can see the confidence level of those main effects you read about by referring to the p value. the p value (typically less than .05) is the probability that the reported statistic resulted from chance alone. 1-p is the probability that the observed effect is genuine.
hope that helps
Source(s): i'm one of those folks who reports such statistics in psychology journals....;) - 1 decade ago
See also your same question under the topic "psychology". A main effect is a main effect, regardless of whether it's in sociology, psychology, or even outside the social sciences, like in physics.
