Statistical vs. substantive (or meaningful) significance
Consider you have completed a survey of employees working in a call center doing customer service for a major manufacturing company. You have found a Pearson r of -.66 between employees' ages and their scores on an employee engagement scale. Interpret this finding. Now, you also observed that there is a relationship between gender and employee engagement (chi-square was statistically significant at p<.05). How would you go about creating an analysis that incorporated both gender and age in predicting employee engagement? Note: Be sure to include in your discussion a comment about the difference between statistical significance and substantive (or meaningful) significance.
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Solution Preview
Pearson r correlation is a type of effect size and provides information about the magnitude of the relationship between two variables. The Pearson r correlation coefficient of -0.66 suggests that there is a meaningful/considerable relationship between employees' ages and employee engagement. Given the Pearson r of -.66, we can conclude that older ages are associated with less employee engagement (or, from another perspective younger ages are associated with more employee engagement). In other words, employees of older ages tend to be less engaged (or, from another perspective, employees of younger ages tend to be more engaged).
Although we ...
Solution Summary
This solution is comprised of an explanation of how to go about creating an analysis that incorporated both gender and age in predicting employee engagement. Included is a detailed explanation of the difference between statistical significance and substantive (or meaningful) significance.