Surprising implications of differences in locations versus differences in means

Social science researchers depend on differences in means between experimental and control conditions to draw substantive conclusions. However, an alternative is use locations. For normal distributions, locations are the same, but for skew different. If a difference similar, same direction, resulting story may be similar. if dissimilar, especially they oppose directionally, differ dramatically. We collected 51 data sets from online repositories check how often versus substantially different or directions. Although values what one counts, overall conclusion that two types of have larger than trivial chance disagreeing substantially. suggest when report statistics (mean standard deviation), should (location, scale, shape) too, against nontrivial imply opposition implied by statistics.