A Proposed Hybrid Effect Size Plus \(p\)-Value Criterion: A Comment on Goodman et al. (2019)

In a recent simulation study, Goodman et al. (2019) compare several methods with regard to their type I and type II error rates in case of a thick null hypothesis that includes all values that are practically equivalent to the point null hypothesis. They propose a hybrid decision criterion only declaring a result "significant" if both a small \(p\)-value and a sufficiently large effect size are obtained. We successfully verify the results using our own software code in R and discuss an additional decision method that is tailored to maintain a pre-defined false positive rate. We confirm that the hybrid decision criterion has comparably low error rates in settings one can check for but point out that the false discovery rate cannot be easily controlled by the researcher. Our analyses are readily accessible and customizable on https://github.com/drehero/goodman-replication.