The undue influence of significant p-values on the perceived importance of study results
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Statistically significant differences between treatments (i.e., results typically associated with p < 0.05) may not always correspond to important differences upon which to base orthopedic practice. If the hypothesis that p < 0.05 unduly influences the perception of importance of study results were true, we would expect that presenting such a p-value would lead to 1) greater agreement among clinicians about the importance of a study result, and 2) greater perceived importance of a study result, when compared with presenting the same results omitting the p-value. METHODS: The participants were 3 orthopedics residents, 5 fellows, and 4 attending orthopedic surgeons at a university hospital. We constructed a 40-item questionnaire with the comparison groups, primary outcome of interest, and the results from each of 40 studies. These studies represent a variety of interventions across orthopedic surgery assessed in 2-group comparative intervention studies (randomized trials, observational studies) and were published between 2000 and 2002 in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery--American Volume. For each question, respondents were asked to rate the importance of the study results. Participants answered the questionnaire first without p-values and then, 8 weeks later, with p-values (and a random sample of items without p-values). An intra-class correlation quantified agreement between clinicians when answering items with and without p-values. The difference in mean importance scores between the two presentations was also estimated. RESULTS: Of 40 eligible clinical comparative studies, 30 reported p < 0.05 for their primary comparison. Without presenting p-values, overall agreement regarding clinical significance among reviewers was fair (ICC = 0.35, 95% CI: 0.25-0.49). In the 30 studies with p < 0.05, mean importance scores (1 = low; 3 = high) were greater when p-values were presented (difference 0.6, CI 0.1-1.1). 10 of 12 reviewers perceived results to be more important when presented with significant p-values. INTERPRETATION: When significant, p-values unduly influence the perception of clinicians regarding the importance of study results.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.101 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it