Hypothesis

• The hypothesis is the thesis, or main idea, of an experiment. It is a statement about a predicted relationship between at least two variables.
• ome non-scientific synonyms are speculation, guess and hunch.
• The statement of a research hypothesis is designed to fit the type of research design that has been selected
• A non experimental hypothesis is a statement of your predictions of how events, traits, or behaviors might be related-not a statement about cause and effect.
• Phenomenology, case studies, naturalistic observation, qualitative studies, and surveys of attitudes or opinions, for example, are primarily intended to explore and describe behaviors as they occur naturally. And it would be difficult to make guesses about behaviors or events that might or might not occur.
• In a true experiment, the hypothesis predicts the effects of specific antecedent conditions on some behavior that is to be measured.
• Every experiment has at least one hypothesis.
• Hypothesis is a statement that explains the effects of specified antecedent conditions on a measured behavior
• Hypotheses must be synthetic statements that are testable, falsifiable, parsimonious, and (we hope) fruitful.
• Synthetic statements are those that can be either true or false. Each experimental hypothesis must be a synthetic statement so that there can be some chance it is true and some chance it is false.
• Non-synthetic statements should be avoided at all costs. These fall into two categories: analytic or contradictory.
• An analytic statement is one that is always true.
• A contradictory statement is one with elements that oppose each other because contradictory statements are always false.
• Because analytic statements are always true and contradictory statements are always false, we do not need to conduct experiments to test them
• A hypothesis meets the definition of a synthetic statement when it can be stated in what is known as the "If-then" form.
• An experimental hypothesis must also be testable—that is, the means for manipulating antecedent conditions and measuring the resulting behavior must exist.
• Untestable hypotheses are not necessarily useless. Scientists who speculated on what it would be like to walk on the moon probably generated quite a few untestable hypotheses at the beginning of the space program.
• Statements of research hypotheses must be falsifiable (disprovable) by the research findings. Hypotheses need to be worded so that failures to find the predicted effect must be considered evidence that the hypothesis is indeed false.
• Questions that can be answered by philosophy or religion is not falsifiable
• A research hypothesis should also be parsimonious. A simple hypothesis is preferred over one that requires many supporting assumptions.
• Ideally, a hypothesis is also fruitful; that is, it leads to new studies.