Trying to do a research paper. One of my potential sources says “group a scored slightly, but significantly worse than group b”. I don’t understand how you can score slightly but significantly worse. Googled that phrase and it sounds like the source means “statistically significant”.
In: 6
The question begins with how one could say that something is different from something else. Especially when that thing is a property or characteristic of a group when it might not be possible to test the entire population. Typically it is possible to only take samples of two populations and compare the average results.
The problem is that given variances in each population, we cannot be sure that our comparison actually measures an actual difference or whether it was pure random chance. This is the question of significance. In many researches, a 5% threshold is used and this is conventional but arbitrary (a researcher could decide to use higher or lower significance)
So if one is comparing some parameter in group A to group B at a 5% significance level and conclude there is a difference in that parameter between the two groups, there is a 5% chance that this conclusion is incorrect (ELI5 here). In other words, assuming group A and group B were NOT different, 5% of the time the measured difference could have come about through random chance.
The statistical significance is the “sureness” of the conclusion. Statistical significance says NOTHING about the IMPORTANCE of the difference.
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