Research Hypothesis

Deedar Jaleel Raheem

Fourth Grade

2012

Hypothesis
After having thoroughly researched your question, you should have some educated guess about how things work. This educated guess about the answer to your question is called the hypothesis. The hypothesis must be worded so that it can be tested in your experiment. Do this by expressing the hypothesis using your independent variable (the variable you change during your experiment) and your dependent variable (the variable you observe-changes in the dependent variable depend on changes in the independent variable). In fact, many hypotheses are stated exactly like this: "If a particular independent variable is changed, then there is also a change in a certain dependent variable."

Definitions of hypothesis
A research question is essentially a hypothesis asked in the form of a question.

Hypothesis is a formal statement that presents the expected relationship between an independent and dependent variable.(Creswell, 1994)

It is a tentative prediction about the nature of the relationship between two or more variables.

An hypothesis is a statement or explanation that is suggested byknowledge or observation but has not, yet, been proved or disproved.(MacleodClark J and Hockey L 1981)

Key Info
A hypothesis is an educated guess about how things work. Most of the time a hypothesis is written like this: "If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen." (Fill in the blanks with the appropriate information from your own experiment.) Your hypothesis should be something that you can actually test, what's called a testable hypothesis. In other words, you need to be able to measure both "what you do" and "what will happen."

Nature of Hypothesis
It can be tested verifiable or falsifiable Hypotheses are not moral or ethical questions It is neither too specific nor to general It is a prediction of consequences It is considered valuable even if proven false

Types of Hypotheses
NULL HYPOTHESES
The null hypothesisrepresents a theory that has been put forward, either because it is believed to be true or because it is to be used asa basis for argument, but has not been proved. Has serious outcome if incorrect decision is made!

ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESES
The alternative hypothesisis a statement of what a hypothesis test is set up to establish. Opposite of Null Hypothesis. Only reached if H0is rejected. Frequently alternativeis actual desired conclusion of the researcher!

EXAMPLE In a clinical trial of a new drug, the null hypothesismight be that the new drug is no better, on average, than the current drug. We would write H0: there is no difference between the two drugs on average. The alternative hypothesismight be that: the new drug has a different effect, on average, compared to that of the current drug. We would write H1: the two drugs have different effects, on average. the new drug is better, on average, than the current drug. We would write H1: the new drug is better than the current drug, on average.

Formulating a hypothesis
Is important to narrow a question down to one that can reasonably be studied in a research project.

The formulation of the hypothesis basically varies with the kind of research project conducted: QUALITATIVE QUANTITATIVE

What Are Examples of a Hypothesis?

A hypothesis is an explanation for a set of observations. Here are examples of a scientific hypothesis. Answer: Although you could state a scientific hypothesis in various ways, most hypothesis are either "If, then" statements or else forms of the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis sometimes is called the "no difference" hypothesis. The null hypothesis is good for experimentation because it's simple to disprove. If you disprove a null hypothesis, that is evidence for a relationship between the variables you are examining. For example: Examples of the Null Hypothesis

Hyperactivity is unrelated to eating sugar. All daisies have the same number of petals.

Examples of an If, Then Hypothesis

If you get at least 6 hours of sleep, you will do better on tests than if you get less sleep. If you drop a ball, it will fall toward the ground.

Improving a Hypothesis To Make It Testable While there are many ways to state a hypothesis, you may wish to revise your first hypothesis in order to make it easier to design an experiment to test it. For example, let's say you have a bad breakout the morning after eating a lot of greasy food. You may wonder if there is a correlation between eating greasy food and getting pimples. You propose a hypothesis: Eating greasy food causes pimples. Next you need to design an experiment to test this hypothesis. Let's say you decide to eat greasy food every day for a week and record the effect on your face. Then, as a control, for the next week you'll avoid greasy food and see what happens. Now, this is not a very good experiment because it does not take into account other factors, such as hormone levels, stress,

sun exposure, exercise or any number of other variables which might conceivably affect your skin. The problem is that you cannot assign cause to your effect. If you eat french fries for a week and suffer a breakout, can you definitely say it was the grease in the food that caused it? Maybe it was the salt. Maybe it was the potato. Maybe it was unrelated to diet.You can't prove your hypothesis. It's much easier to disprove a hypothesis. So, let's restate the hypothesis to make it easy to evaluate the data. Getting pimples is unaffected by eating greasy food. So, if you eat fatty food every day for a week and suffer breakouts and then don't breakout the week that you avoid greasy food, you can be pretty sure something is up. Can you disprove the hypothesis? Probably not, since it is so hard to assign cause and effect. However, you can make a strong case that there is some relationship between diet and acne. If your skin stays clear for the entire test, you may decide to accept your hypothesis. Again, you didn't prove or disprove anything, which is fine.

Hypothesis: All forks have three tines. Disproven if you find any fork with a different number of tines. Hypothesis: There is no relationship between smoking and lung cancer. While it is difficult to establish cause and effect in health issues, you can apply statistics to data to discredit this hypothesis or to support it, if the rates of lung cancer are the same between smokers and non-smokers. Hypothesis: Plants require liquid water to survive. Disproven if you find a plant that doesn't need it. Hypothesis: Cats do not show a paw preference (cat equivalent to being rightor left-handed). You could gather data about the number of times cats bat at a toy with either paw and analyze the data to determine whether cats, on the whole, favor one paw over the other. Be careful here, because individual cats, like people, might (or might not) express a preference.

References
http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples/examples-ofhypothesis.html http://chemistry.about.com/od/scientificmethod/f/What-Are-ExamplesOf-A-Hypothesis.htm http://chemistry.about.com/b/2012/03/01/hypothesis-examples.htm http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fairprojects/project_hypothesis.shtml#checklist