Strange P-Values

[ManuSchue]

Hey there,

I am trying to make Pearson Correlation by the following order: cor.test(Vorbildlichkeit~Arbeitszufriedenheit, data = Arbeitszufriedenheit_und_Digital_Leadership_Digitalitaet).

That's the output:

Spearman's rank correlation rho

data: x and y
S = 199841, p-value = 4.602e-07
alternative hypothesis: true rho is not equal to 0
sample estimates:
rho
0.4282146

Can someone tell me why I got such a strange P Value of 4.602e-0,7? What does it mean? It is higher than 0.05 so I cannot accept my H1?

Thank you!

[mattwarkentin]

Hi @ManuSchue,

When numbers get very large or very small, it can be tedious to have to write out all of the zeros required to fully present the number. In these situations, in can be convenient to use scientific notation which is what is being used here:

4.602e-0.7 = 0.0000004602

So your p-value is much smaller than 0.05 and thus you could conclude that at an alpha level of 0.05, you can reject the null hypothesis (H1). Hope this is helpful.

[martin.R]

@ManuSchue

p-value = 4.602e-07

That's equal to 0.0000004602.

[ManuSchue]

Thank you very much Martin! So 4.602e-0,7 means 4.602*10^-7?

[martin.R]

Yes, it's scientific notation. You can alter it via e.g. options(scipen = 999) (change the value to see the differences).