Main Takeaways on Hypotheses

Hypothesis: a proposed explanation for a phenomenon that can be tested by scientific research and experimentation.

A hypothesis must meet two requirements:

1. It must contain an educated prediction of the answer to the research question
2. It must be testable

A well-formulated hypothesis contains at least one dependent and at least one independent variable, in which the independent variable is the assumed cause or predictor, and the dependent variable the assumed effect or outcome.

The typical format of a hypothesis is:

“Varying independent variable x for a certain population,

leads to a described effect

on dependent variable y for that population”

In qualitative research, when carrying out statistical analyses, you will often need to formulate a null Hypotheses H₀ and an Alternative Hypothesis H₁.

Null hypothesis H₀: the default prediction that there is no association between the dependent and the independent variables

Alternative Hypothesis H₁: the prediction that there is an association of some sort between the dependent and the independent variables