How to Support or Reject a Hypothesis
Support (never say "Accept") or reject a hypothesis based on statistical evidence that determines if there is a significance level.
To decide if we have sufficient evidence against the null hypothesis (H0) to reject it (in favor of the alternative hypothesis), you must first decide upon a significance level.
The significance level is the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis (H0) when it the null hypothesis is true and is denoted by α.
The 5% significance level is a common choice for statistical test.
Once you have carried out research or experiments, the next step is to compare the p-value with the chosen significance level.
If p<α then we reject the null hypothesis (H0) and accept alternative hypothesis (H1).
The lower the p-value, the more evidence we have against the null hypothesis (H0) and so the more confidence we can have that the null hypothesis (H0) is false.
If p≥α then we do not have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis (H0) and so we must accept it.
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