Reply to Boomsma and Molenaar

Boomsma (B) and Molenaar (M) raise several useful issues , for which we thank them. But they do not offer alternatives. It is as true in scientific discussion as in sports: You can't beat sump'n with nuttin'. Merely asking worried questions is not a sound reason to reject a method for which there is some strong support. Example: B and M criticize the experiments by Shevokas and At­ kinson on the grounds of possible bias. But they give no evidence of this. Atkinson's and Shevokas's work certainly might have been b iased , t hough both repor ted being skeptical about resampling before starting the work. But in the absence of any contrary evidence, there would seem a presumption that the exis t ing f indings are meaningful even if not conclusive. The mere possibility of a con­ founding factor—which almost never can be ruled out—is hardly reason to dismiss those studies out of hand. More fundamentally, B and M do not present or cite any other re­ search on resampling. This is what is needed—studies wi th other designs and different students. We will be happy to cooperate with them or with anyone else in con­ ducting such studies. We appreciate the nice things tha t B and M say about our RESAMPLING STATS program. As to their cr i t icisms, we lack space to comment on many of them. Most important, however, is that our original art icle is not mainly about the program; rather, it is about resampling as a general method, whether it be done with our program or with another. And we greatly hope that B's and M's concentrat ion on our computer p rogram does not d is t ract the reader's attention from our central point: Resampling is more likely to produce a sound answer for the researcher and student than is the conventional formulaic method. B and M say that the BASIC pro­ gram we presented for comparison could be greatly shortened. But they do not say how. Nor do they show a program that would rebut our c la im that RESAMPLING STATS is much clearer. They also criticize our selection of a pro­ gram because it supposedly con­ tains a "false" suggestion. In fact, we selected the very first program in the Quantitative Literacy Series book on s imula t ion by Gnanadesikan, Scheaffer, and Swift. We hoped that choosing a published program, the first in this standard book, would be the best way to avoid the charge that we had set up a straw man. But this, too, is a matter that deserves investigation and not just vague criticism. We have, there­ fore, recent ly suggested to the editor of a technical journal (who