An important question in statistics is what constitutes a meaningful relationship: how much does one factor need to influence another to be considered important? In engineering, for example, the relationship between factors usually needs to be really large to be reputable. The social sciences, on the other hand, have often been criticized for placing value on findings with comparatively small relationships. Basically, the value of a research finding is not determined only by the size of its relationship, but also by the standards of its scientific field. Different relationships are more or less meaningful in different types of research.

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