Centre for Policy on Ageing



Overcoming feelings of powerlessness in "aging" researchers — a primer on statistical power in analysis of variance designs
Author(s)	Joel R Levin
Journal title	Psychology and Aging, vol 12, no 1, March 1997
Pages	pp 84-106
Keywords	Mental health [elderly] ; Ageing process ; Methodology ; Statistics ; Variance analysis.
Annotation	This article aims to help researchers who are investigating the psychology of ageing to become more sensitive to the role played by statistical power in hypothesis testing. This includes an awareness of general issues such as problems in interpreting statistically non-significant results, and the relationship between effect size and required sample size. A general rationale and specific procedures for examining the statistical power characteristics of psychology of ageing empirical studies are provided. Four basic ingredients of statistical hypothesis testing are reviewed; two measures of effect size are introduced (standardised mean differences, and the proportion of variation accounted for by the effect of interest); and methods given for estimating these measures from already completed studies. With this information, researchers should gain some understanding of the important roles of power and sample size in statistical hypothesis testing.
Accession Number	CPA-971120239 A
Classmark	D: BG: 3D: 3Y: 3YA
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.