Decimal Dust, Significant Digits, and the Search for Stars
Abstract
The practice of rounding statistical results to two decimal places is one of a large number of heuristics followed in the social sciences. In evaluating this heuristic, the authors conducted simulations to investigate the precision of simple correlations. They considered a true correlation of .15 and ran simulations in which the sample sizes were 60, 100, 200, 500, 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000. They then looked at the digits in the correlations’...
Paper Details
Title
Decimal Dust, Significant Digits, and the Search for Stars
Published Date
Jul 1, 2008
Volume
12
Issue
4
Pages
687 - 694
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