An explorative literature review on misinterpretations of confidence intervals

Abstract

Confidence intervals are presented in various scientific fields and are used to justify claims,although in several studies it has been shown that various groups of people, for example researchers, teachers and students incorrectly interpret the confidence interval. To get an overview over articles which studies how confidence intervals are misinterpreted we have performed an explorative literature review. The search for articles to include was conducted in a semi-structured way, and the explorative literature review exist of 36 articles. The results are presented in tables, where the articles have been placed in the table of the relevant misinterpretation. In this study there are five different tables which are probability fallacies, precision fallacies, likelihood fallacies, overlaps fallacies and miscellaneous fallacies. This paper state that confidence intervals are commonly misinterpreted accordingly to our first four categories. In the last category, the less common misinterpretations are presented, at least less common based on the articles included in this paper