Jacob Cohen (statistician)

Jacob Cohen (1923 – January 20, 1998) was a United States statistician and psychologist best known for his work on statistical power and effect size, which helped to lay foundations for current statistical meta-analysis^[1][2] and the methods of estimation statistics. He gave his name to such measures as Cohen's kappa, Cohen's d, and Cohen's h.

Power analysis and significance testing

In addition to being an advocate of power analysis and effect size, Cohen was a critic of the standard significance testing procedure used in statistics, which he termed "NHST" (null hypothesis significance testing). In one example, he showed that NHST would lead us to conclude that, if all we knew about a person was that he or she was a member of congress, we would reject the null hypothesis that he or she was an American.^[3]

Career

He received his PhD in clinical psychology at New York University in 1950. Between 1959 and retirement in 1993 he worked in the psychology department at New York University, latterly as the head of the quantitative psychology group.^[4]

He was awarded the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Psychological Association in 1997 and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association and the American Statistical Association. ^[5]

Selected works

Below are listed some of Cohen's works. Where multiple authors are present, full names are used to facilitate reader searches for other works by those authors.

• Jacob Cohen (1960), "A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales" (PDF), Educational and Psychological Measurement 20 (1): 37–46, doi:10.1177/001316446002000104, retrieved 10 July 2010 
• Jacob Cohen (October 1968), "Weighted kappa: Nominal scale agreement provision for scaled disagreement or partial credit", Psychological Bulletin 70 (4): 213–220, doi:10.1037/h0026256, PMID 19673146 
• Jacob Cohen (1968), "Multiple regression as a general data-analytic system" (PDF), Psychological Bulletin 70 (6): 426–443, doi:10.1037/h0026714, retrieved 11 July 2010 
• Jacob Cohen (1988), Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.), New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ISBN 0-8058-0283-5, retrieved 10 July 2010 
• Jacob Cohen (1992), "A power primer" (PDF), Psychological Bulletin 112 (1): 155–159, doi:10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.155, PMID 19565683, retrieved 10 July 2010 
• Jacob Cohen (June 1992), "Statistical power analysis" (PDF), Current Directions in Psychological Science 1 (3), doi:10.1111/1467-8721.ep10768783, JSTOR 20182143, retrieved 10 July 2010 
• Jacob Cohen (December 1994), "The Earth is round (p < .05)" (PDF), American Psychologist 49 (12): 997–1003, doi:10.1037/0003-066x.49.12.997, retrieved 11 July 2010 
• Patricia Cohen & Jacob Cohen (1996), Life Values and Adolescent Mental Health, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ISBN 0-8058-1774-3, retrieved 10 July 2010 
• Michael Borenstein, Hannah Rothstein, Jacob Cohen, David Schoenfeld, Jesse Berliln, & Edward Lakatos (2001), Power and Precision: A computer program for statistical power analysis and confidence intervals, Englewood, New Jersey: Biostat, Inc, ISBN 0-9709662-0-2, retrieved 10 July 2010 
• Jacob Cohen, Patricia Cohen, Stephen G. West & Leona S. Alken (2003), Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (3rd ed.), New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ISBN 0-8058-2223-2, retrieved 10 July 2010 

References

External links

• A Power Primer by Jacob Cohen