How Institutions Decide What Counts as Evidence

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Brainy Breakfasts: How Institutions Decide What Counts as Evidence

Date: 8 September 2026
Time: 4:00 – 5:00PM (Malaysia Time – GMT+8) 
Mode: Online 
Registration Link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/asuMzsgGmH
 

A single threshold decides what gets treated as evidence. Research that clears p<0.05 is reported and acted upon. Research that does not often goes unmentioned. The convention carries more authority than its foundations support.

David Bartram, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester and Editor-in-Chief of Social Indicators Research, will argue that statistical significance does not tell us what matters. Where data do not come from a random sample, or do not constitute a sample at all, the procedure cannot sensibly be applied. Even with a random sample, the coefficients carry more important information. He will demonstrate this through an extended example in which attention to coefficients yields conclusions that stand in tension with, and improve on, those drawn from p-values. 

Participants will leave with a clearer basis for judging quantitative claims: what a coefficient reveals that a significance test conceals, when significance testing does not apply, and how to read results where the convention has been used without warrant.

The session will be beneficial to researchers, analysts, and evaluators working with quantitative data. It will also interest those who commission, review, or act on quantitative evidence in policy and business settings, where the significance threshold often stands in as an unexamined proxy for whether a finding counts. 

About the Speaker

David Bartram is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester. He is Editor-in-Chief of Social Indicators Research and Vice-President of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS). He has published two books: Key Concepts in Migration (SAGE, with Maritsa Poros and Pierre Monforte) and International Labor Migration: Foreign Workers and Public Policy (Palgrave). He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from Kenyon College. 

Brainy Breakfasts Series

Brainy Breakfasts is a monthly thought leadership series hosted by the Sunway Institute for Global Strategy and Competitiveness. The 2026 to 2027 edition, Creating Value in a Hybrid World, convenes thinkers and practitioners across sectors and disciplines to examine how value is created in a world shaped by the interaction of human and artificial intelligence, economic and social systems, and technological and planetary change.