How P-Values Help Us Test Hypotheses: Crash Course Statistics #21

Today we’re going to begin our three-part unit on p-values. In this episode, we’ll talk about Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (or NHST) which is a framework for comparing two sets of information. In NHST we assume that there is no difference between the two things we are observing and use our p-value as a predetermined cutoff for if something seems sufficiently rare or not to allow us to reject that these two observations are the same. This p-value tells us if something is statistically significant, but as you’ll see that doesn’t necessarily mean the information is significant or meaningful to you.