Re: [Air-L] A question for researchers interested in the basics of statistical inference

and something I forgot to say...

2. the analysis. You can certainly do things like regression analysis with your sample. The 'statistical significance' simply tells you how confident you can be that any statistical effect is real (i.e. non random) for the sample.

in most situations it's recommended to look at confidence intervals not just p values because they tell you the estimated maximum and minimum size of the effect/difference given your chosen probability level. Just because an effect is statistically significant doesn't mean it's either large or important :-) http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/292/6522/746 is a good place to start. Ben