Ordinarily, when one talks about hypothesis, one simply means a mere assumption or some supposition to be proved or disproved. But for a researcher hypothesis is a formal question that he intends to resolve. Thus a hypothesis may be defined as “a proposition or a set of propositions set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide some investigation or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts”. Quite often a research hypothesis is a predictive statement, capable of being tested by scientific methods, that relates an independent variable to some dependent variable. For example, consider statements like the following ones:
“Students who receive counseling will show a greater increase in creativity than students not receiving counseling” or “the automobile A is performing as well as automobile B”.
These are hypotheses capable of being objectively verified and tested. Thus, we may conclude that a hypothesis states what we are looking for and it is a proposition that can be put to a test to determine its validity.
46 Comments