CECE UWA Clinical Mental Health Counseling (CMHC) Practice Test

Statistical significance is about whether an observed effect is unlikely to have occurred by chance, given a null hypothesis and a chosen threshold. It uses probability to decide if the result could be due to random variation, not whether the effect matters in real-world practice. Clinical significance, by contrast, asks whether the size of the effect is large enough to be meaningful for patients and care settings. You can have a result that is statistically significant but clinically trivial if the sample is large and the effect is small, and you can have a clinically important effect that isn’t statistically significant in a small study due to limited power. That contrast is why the statement linking statistical significance to the likelihood that results are not due to chance is the best way to distinguish the two concepts.