The Significance of No Significance

I don't know how 'tearing your hair out' became a phrase and symbol of stress and despair. Maybe the 'head in hands' pose was insufficient one day and someone needed to take it a step further and, presto... However it came around it fits the bill for how I'm feeling right now.

Months and months of testing, enduring no shows and no brain participants, not to mention the bitter coldness of our lab room in winter, have been followed by many hours of coding, with many more hours are still to be come. I'm halfway through inputting my data into the "friendly" statistics software that is SPSS when I thought I'd treat myself to a cheeky bit of analysis to get some preliminary results, us PhD students have to get our daily excitement somewhere.

It's difficult to describe the hopeful build up as you click various buttons, check boxes and give your analysis commands. The excitement builds during those few moments as SPSS computes and the anticipation heightens as you scroll through the output to get to that all crucial p value which either makes or breaks your hypothesis...

It is NOT difficult to describe the stomach sinking disappointment when the p value indicates that your analysis is not significant, it's not even in the neighbourhood of significant. In fact, it might as well have jumped on a plane and flown around the world to the other side as it would probably be closer to significance over there.  I know this is only half my data set but I would be expecting it to give me some indication as to which direction it was heading in, and it's not looking good at the moment folks.

Having spent a large chunk of time working out a logical rationale for these hypotheses, I've reasoned why I expect what I expect and when the unexpected happens, thern where are am left? I have either conducted a poor experiment which doesn't measure what I thought it would, not a great position to be in if we're honest, or my non-significant result is significantly interesting. How on earth do you make the distinction? More hypotheses, more experiments, more anticipation and the threat of even more disappointment. Isn't academia fun?

Academic journals seem to shy away from the publication of non-significant results unless you can prove the significance of your non-significance. I might have a shot of this but it's going to take another few months of testing, transcribing, coding and analysing to find out.

Lucky me.