Is two-tailed testing for directional research hypotheses tests legitimate?

By Hyun-Chul Cho, Shuzo Abe. 2013

275 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper demonstrates that there is currently a widespread misuse of two-tailed testing for directional research hypotheses tests. One probable reason for this overuse of two-tailed testing is the seemingly valid beliefs that two-tailed testing is more conservative and safer than one-tailed testing. However, the authors examine the legitimacy of this notion and find it to be flawed. A second and more fundamental cause of the current problem is the pervasive oversight in making a clear distinction between the research hypothesis and the statistical hypothesis. Based upon the explicated, sound relationship between the research and statistical hypotheses, the authors propose a new scheme of hypothesis classification to facilitate and clarify the proper use of statistical hypothesis testing in empirical research.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d1b7175264cdf49c95eacd7e98d62f7a7609642

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Citations in the corpus

Sample Size Justification (2021, unknown): “…discussion about when directional tests are appropriate, they are perfectly defen-sible from a Neyman-Pearson perspective on hypothesis testing (Cho & Abe, 2013), which makes a (pre-registered) directional test a straightforward approach to both increase the power of a test, as the riskiness…”
The Joint Moderating Effects of Activated Negative Moods and Group Voice Climate on the Relationship between Power Distance Orientation and Employee Voice Behavior (2017, result): “First, our results reveal that, in general, PDO had a significant negative relationship with 1 As our hypotheses regarding the relative strengths of simple slopes are directional research hypotheses, they can be examined on the basis of the p .05, one-tailed test (Cho & Abe, 2013).”
The fake news game: actively inoculating against the risk of misinformation (2019, background): “…is largely motivational and refers to the recognition that one’s attitude on an issue is vulnerable to attack, whereas ‘refutational preemption’ is concerned with providing people with specific arguments to help resist persuasion attempts (McGuire and Papageorgis 1962; McGuire 1964; Compton 2013).”
Evaluation of measurment and structural model of the reflective model constructs in PLS – SEM (2016, methodology): “The significance level of the t-value was assessed by a one-tailed or two tailed distribution(Chin & Newsted 1999; Cho & Abe, 2013).”