ON THE COMMUNICATION OF INFORMATION BY DISPLAYS OF STANDARD ERRORS AND CONFIDENCE-INTERVALS

A survey of practices regarding the presentation of information about reliability of means in psychological research publications over the l ast century reveals some advance in quality of communication, greater for tabular presentations than for graphic presentations, but also sub stantial room for improvement. In this article, problems of interpreta tion and communication associated with presentations of standard error s and confidence intervals in research reports are examined from both statistical and psychological perspectives. Four general principles of effective communication are proposed and illustrated in application t o presentations of data from common psychological research designs, wi th special attention to problems arising in connection with repeated m easures.