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This is a very good and interesting question. As soon as you become interested in practical significance, you make your decision subjective. This is not bad by any means. It means that you are free to determine whether or not an outcome is important to study, even if you have not reached the classic "p < .05". Statistics tells you something about the likelihood that what you got was produced by chance alone. But in situations that deal for example with child safety, you aren't going to continue (or terminate) a process based on results that come in at "p = .062". In a statistics examination and with a presumed 5% confidence, p = .062 is not a strong enough result to "reject the null hypothesis". But what could that possibly mean if you are looking at factors affecting child safety?


I think the bottom line is this. If you are engaged in any kind of academic study and neither the study nor the results will bring harm to anyone, then let the statistics guide your research decisions. If there is the potential that harm will come to one or more individuals as a result of the study or its outcomes, then you need to re-evaluate the purpose of the study and consider the safety and well-being of the people involved.

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