The harmful effect of null hypothesis significance testing on marketing research: An example

Abstract

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has had and continues to have an adverse effect on marketing research. The most recent American Statistical Association (ASA) statement recognized NHST’s invalidity and thus recommended abandoning it in 2019. Instead of revisiting the ASA’s reasoning, this research note focuses on NHST’s pernicious peripheral effect on marketing research. One example of this problem is the well-known and influential recommendation against excessive power in McQuitty (2004, 2018). Instead, researchers always should prefer larger sample sizes because they always engender more precision than smaller sample sizes, ceteris paribus.