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What is a confidence interval?
I think confidence intervals might be the most commonly-misunderstood statistic. I’ve been trying to understand them better and this is what I’ve learnt. (In this blog I explained p-values and statistical significance and recommend reading that first.) How do we create confidence intervals? We typically use p-values to test the null hypothesis – that there…
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What do we mean when we talk about a ‘strong relationship’ between two numbers?
People will often talk about finding ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ relationships between two variables, X and Y. I think this language can be unhelpfully vague and prone to misconception. It could sound like three things: Sometimes people seem to use this vague language intentionally. It allows them to imply that they have discovered that X causes…
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What is a p-value? What makes something statistically significant?
Most people, including me, find it really hard to understand p-values and statistical significance. Even proper scientists struggle to explain it. This blog is my attempt to explain it as clearly as I can, for my own benefit. It’s an iron law of social science that any definition of statistical significance will have at least…
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What was the impact of Covid-19 measures on crime?
A new systematic review is out on the impact of Covid-19 measures on crime. Lockdown was perhaps the most drastic crime prevention measure ever taken – what was its impact? Here’s the abstract: COVID-19 caused a great burden on the healthcare system and led to lockdown measures across the globe. These measures are likely to…
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How do social science RCTs happen?
I would like to see more rigorous evaluations of social policy interventions. This doesn’t just mean more randomised control trials (RCTs) but that is an important step. If we want more RCTs, how do we achieve this? I think it helps to learn about the situations where RCTs have happened in the past. Perhaps we…
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Peter Henderson 