Following changes to the surveys, students in the subsequent cohort demonstrated an increase in attitudes and a nearly significant increase in self-efficacy ( P =0.0505).
A field guide to the near-miss p-value
Ways to say not significant without saying not significant.
When a p-value lands just past 0.05, the result does not change but the prose does. This is a catalogue of that prose: 50 distinct phrases, found and quoted in 5,781 open-access papers, each one shown in the sentence its authors actually published.
5,968
sentences quoted
50
distinct phrasings
0.055
median reported p-value
1,689
journals
One at random
another →The wall at 0.05
Every reported p-value in the corpus, in bins of 0.01. Nothing about the statistics changes as the line is crossed. Everything about the writing does.
How the corpus lands
Most-used phrasings
all phrases →| Phrase | Sentences | Median p | Worst offender |
|---|---|---|---|
| quite significant | 1,480 | 0.058 | 0.130 |
| only marginally significant | 950 | 0.063 | 0.490 |
| nearly significant | 777 | 0.059 | 0.890 |
| moderately significant | 670 | 0.010 | 1.000 |
| might be significant | 570 | 0.080 | 0.250 |
| slightly significant | 532 | 0.047 | 0.353 |
| might not be significant | 180 | 0.065 | 0.065 |
| not quite significant | 111 | 0.060 | 0.130 |
| more or less significant | 93 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| not yet significant | 88 | 0.093 | 0.142 |