When testing a hypothesis, a researcher needs to be aware of the concerns that can reduce his or her ability to arrive at an accurate result. One of the issues a researcher needs to look out for includes Type I and Type II error, which can lead to false positive and false negative conclusions respectively (El-gohary, 2019). A type I error occurs when a researcher gets a false positive result, which means that the researcher concludes that a variable had a positive impact when it actually did not. In Type I error, the researcher rejects the null hypothesis, when it is true by concluding that the results are statistically significant.
Type II error, on the other hand, occurs when a researcher gets a result that leads to a conclusion that a variable intervention did not have a positive impact on the outcome when in reality it had. In this type of error, the researcher rejects the null hypothesis when it is false. As El-gohary (2019) asserts, this can occur when the study missed key indicators of improvement or attributes that may have had a positive impact on the variable tested.
Researchers can reduce Type I errors by setting lower significance levels in the research. Furthermore, research can reduce the Type II error by increasing the sample size or increasing the significance level to ensure that they can improve on the statistical power. The statistical power is the likelihood of a hypothesis test being able to detect a true impact in the research if there is any. A statistical power test, as El-gohary (2019) explains, can help the researcher minimize Type II errors.
Reference
El-gohary, T. M. (2019). Hypothesis testing, type I and type II errors: Expert discussion with didactic clinical scenarios. International Journal of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (IJHRS), 8(3), 132.
this is was qoustion
Discuss the hypothesis testing issues of Type I and Type II errors and how those can cause the researcher to reach a wrong conclusion about rejecting the null hypothesis. What steps must researchers take to avoid Type I and Type II errors?