Journal bans p-values

Editors from the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology have banned p-values. Or rather null hypothesis significance testing – which includes all the common statistical tests usually reported in studies.

A bold move and an interesting one. In an editorial, the new editor David Trafimow states,

null hypothesis significance testing procedure has been shown to be logically invalid and to provide little information about the actual likelihood of either the null or experimental hypothesis.

He seems to be on a mission and cites his own paper from 12 years ago in support of the position.

So what should authors provide instead to support or refute a hypothesis? Strong descriptive statistics including effect sizesl and the presentation of frequency or distributional data is encouraged. Which sounds reasonable. And larger sample sizes are also required. Ah, were it that easy.

Bayesian approaches are encouraged but not required.

Challenging the dominance of poorly considered p-value is correct. I’d like to see a medical journal do the same.