The classroom teaching of statistics is the pivot for answering these research questions – How confident is the confidence interval and how confident do you want to be as a researcher that sample estimates collected are as accurate as you wish? These are the focus of this editorial, to highlight some of these facts, myths about test of significance as it relates to confidence intervals and the question how confident the confidence interval is needs to be interrogated.
Most biomedical research testing the level of significance report Confidence Intervals (C.Is), and these are useful in interpreting results of statistical analysis. Literally, it should give the researcher some degree of confidence about the research output in terms of reliability, accuracy, and precision. It is usual for biomedical researchers and other investigators to ask questions such as ‘Is the result statistically significant?”, and this is a source of serious concern among researchers., Some tend to disregard or downplay a finding just because it was not significant while some are worried just because the outcomes were not statistically significant.
The reporting of confidence intervals usually follows hypothesis testing or significance testing. Hypotheses refer to statements concerning the situation being investigated which are usually stated as two mutually exclusive options, a null hypothesis, and an alternative hypothesis. These can be stated as two tail which is usually favored or a one tail hypotheses. The null hypothesis is a statement of no association between variables or no difference in means while the alternative hypothesis states that there’s a difference or an association beyond what is attributable to chance.1 Each time a null hypothesis is rejected, there is always an alternative hypothesis for possible acceptance. The interests of medical researchers are varied, and research questions result in statement of hypotheses.
Examples of such questions are: In the article on Burden of Erectile dysfunction among chronic heart failure patients in Ibadan: A pilot study, one may want to find out if there is a significant difference in the International index of erectile function between chronic heart failure patients and patients without cardiac failure.