Steps and Confidence Intervals in Hypothesis Testing

This section lists four key steps in hypothesis testing and explains the close relationship between confidence intervals and significance tests.

Steps in Hypothesis Testing

Answers


  1. You want to select the alpha level before you calculate the probability value. You compare your probability value to your previously-selected alpha level when deciding whether or not you can reject the null hypothesis.

  2. Researchers generally specify a null hypothesis that is the opposite of what they are predicting. Getting a p value lower than the alpha level allows you to reject the null hypothesis, but getting a p value greater than the alpha level does not prove that the null hypothesis is true.