Thank you, but that's a lot of reading for a simple question.
Statistical analysis was by χ2 test; a p value of less than 0.05 was assumed to correlate with a significant difference in rates of injury.
Oh yes it's all clear to me now.
I know it used to be like that before air bags and safety belts, because the steering wheel takes some of the blow in frontal collisions. But such dramatic difference I suspected she might have made the collision worse for the passengers on purpose.
The p value is effectively the % chance something happened by coincidence, and not because of a real effect. Like flipping a coin and getting the same side several times in a row. P value is an assessment of that likelihood. Less than .05 means a less than 5% chance of that. I don't know what the other bit is, except it was likely a method of statistical analysis.
It's a way of saying that the results they found were very unlikely to be due to chance.
Conclusions: Front seat passengers are at increased risk of injury relative to drivers in actual road traffic accidents as recorded in the STAG database. This contradicts crash test data, which suggest drivers are less well protected than front seat passengers in laboratory conditions.
Yes but that could for instance be due to traffic coming from the passenger side that the driver is less likely to see in time.
That would be irrelevant to this case.