Presenting confidence intervals around means is a common method of expressing uncertainty in data. Loftus and Masson (1994) describe confidence intervals for means in within-subjects designs. These confidence intervals are based on the ANOVA mean squared error. Cousineau (2005) presents an alternative to the Loftus and Masson method, but his method produces confidence intervals that are smaller than those of Loftus and Masson. I show why this is the case and offer a simple correction that makes the expected size of Cousineau confidence intervals the same as that of Loftus and Masson confidence intervals. Confidence intervals (CIs) are a staple in the presentation of psychological data because they allow researchers to quickly gage the amount of uncertainty in data (Rouder & Morey, 2005). For within-subjects designs, there are several approaches to creating confidence intervals. For a given design it may not be clear which to choose. Consider a simple within-subjects design with two conditions, a pre-test and post-test. For this design, there are multiple methods of generating confidence intervals. I will discuss each in turn. Approaches to confidence intervals The standard way to build confidence intervals is to compute the standard error of the mean for each condition, and multiply it by the appropriate t-distribution quantile. In order to make this concrete, Table 1 lists hypothetical data for N = 10 participants. A paired t t-test reveals a significant
Bayesian hypothesis testing presents an attractive alternative to p value hypothesis testing. Part I of this series outlined several advantages of Bayesian hypothesis testing, including the ability to quantify evidence and the ability to monitor and update this evidence as data come in, without the need to know the intention with which the data were collected. Despite these and other practical advantages, Bayesian hypothesis tests are still reported relatively rarely. An important impediment to the widespread adoption of Bayesian tests is arguably the lack of user-friendly software for the run-of-the-mill statistical problems that confront psychologists for the analysis of almost every experiment: the t-test, ANOVA, correlation, regression, and contingency tables. In Part II of this series we introduce JASP (http://www.jasp-stats.org), an open-source, cross-platform, user-friendly graphical software package that allows users to carry out Bayesian hypothesis tests for standard statistical problems. JASP is based in part on the Bayesian analyses implemented in Morey and Rouder’s BayesFactor package for R. Armed with JASP, the practical advantages of Bayesian hypothesis testing are only a mouse click away.
Bayesian parameter estimation and Bayesian hypothesis testing present attractive alternatives to classical inference using confidence intervals and p values. In part I of this series we outline ten prominent advantages of the Bayesian approach. Many of these advantages translate to concrete opportunities for pragmatic researchers. For instance, Bayesian hypothesis testing allows researchers to quantify evidence and monitor its progression as data come in, without needing to know the intention with which the data were collected. We end by countering several objections to Bayesian hypothesis testing. Part II of this series discusses JASP, a free and open source software program that makes it easy to conduct Bayesian estimation and testing for a range of popular statistical scenarios (Wagenmakers et al. this issue).
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