Are The Social Sciences Ultimately Futile? The Problem With P-Values

“In research, the p-value represents the odds that your finding is a fluke, a coincidence, nothing more than a chance occurrence. In p-values, as in golf, lower is better. … And yet it says almost nothing about the size or strength of a result.” If the results of research can always be a fluke, why bother? The problem lies in what we expect from science.