Question 4: The test gives P = 0.09. What can we conclude about high blood pressure and diabetes?
This is the P value from Fisher's exact test.
The test is not significant, the P value being greater than 0.05.
The data are consistent with the null hypothesis that high blood pressure is unrelated to diabetes. We have insufficient evidence to conclude that high blood pressure is related to diabetes, though we could interpret the P value less than 0.1 as being weak evidence in favour of this.
We know from much larger studies that diabetes does increase the risk of hypertension, which reminds us why we should never interpret a non-significant result as showing that there is no effect.
Back to Exercise: Diabetes and high blood pressure in the 2005 M.Sc. questionnaire.
To Applied Biostatistics index.
To Martin Bland's M.Sc. index.
This page maintained by Martin Bland.
Last updated: 7 November, 2006.