Statistical Significance
You can view if there's a statistically significant difference between how certain response groups answered the questions in your survey. To use the statistical significance feature in SurveyMonkey:
The following steps help you create a survey that can display statistical significance.
You want to see if men are significantly more satisfied with your product than women.
A statistically significant difference tells you whether one group's answers are substantially different from another group's answers by using statistical testing. Statistical significance means that the numbers are reliably different, greatly aiding your data analysis. Still, you should also consider whether the results are important — it's up to you to decide how to interpret or take action on your results.
For example, say you receive more customer complaints from women than you do from men. How do you know this is a real difference you should address? One great way is to run a survey to see if your male customers are a lot more satisfied with your product. Using a statistical formula, our statistical significance feature can help you determine if men have significantly higher levels of satisfaction with your product than women. This allows you to take action on data, not on anecdote.
We calculate statistical significance using a standard 95% confidence level. When we display an answer option as statistically significant, it means the difference between two groups has less than a 5% probability of occurring by chance or sampling error alone, which is often displayed as p < 0.05.
To calculate the statistical significance between groups, we use the following formulas:
*1.96 is a number used for the 95% confidence level since 95% of the area under a student's t-distribution function lies within 1.96 standard deviations of the mean.
Continuing the example from above, let's find out if the percent of men who say they are satisfied with your product is significantly more than the percent of women.
Let's say you surveyed 1000 men and 1000 women and found 70% of men say they are satisfied with your product compared to 65% of women. Is 70% significantly higher than 65%?
Use the following survey data to complete the formulas:
Since the absolute value of the test statistic is greater than 1.96, it means the difference between men and women is significant. Men are more likely to be satisfied with your product than women.
To hide statistical significance for all questions:
To hide statistical significance for one question:
The swap rows and columns display option is automatically turned on when you show statistical significance. If you uncheck this display option, statistical significance is turned off as well.