Social Sciences and Humanities Open (Jan 2022)
The state of the art of hypothesis testing in the social sciences
Abstract
Over many decades, one seemingly fatal critique after another has been launched against the use of social sciences' dominant practice of null-hypothesis significance testing, also known as NHST. In the last decade, we have witnessed a further upsurge in this critique, associated with suggestions as to how to conduct quantitative empirical work differently. In this research note, we closely review 148 articles that report findings from quantitative empirical studies published in recent issues of 18 top journals in six prominent disciplines in the social sciences: business, economics, political science, psychology, public administration, and sociology. We conclude that NHST is still overly dominant in all six disciplines, although many economics' studies tend to refer to ‘estimation precision’ rather than ‘statistical significance’. Additionally, we identify a few examples of novel practices that may point the way to change.
