What is a hypothesis?
1 Answer
A hypothesis is what informs an experiment or what is being tested/measured. It is often called an educated guess.
Explanation:
A hypothesis is what informs an experiment or what is being tested/measured. It is often called an educated guess.
Examples of hypotheses:
- As the number of cigarettes a person smokes per day increases, the risk of lung cancer increases.
- Black cats never get adopted from animal shelters.
A hypothesis can be further broken down into a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis. The null hypothesis states that there is no relation and the alternative hypothesis states that there is a relation.
Referring to the first example given above, the null hypothesis would be that there is no relationship between the number of cigarettes a person smokes per day and the risk of lung cancer. The alternative hypothesis is that there is an effect of the number of cigarettes a person smokes per day and the risk of lung cancer OR that the larger the number of cigarettes a person smokes per day, the larger the risk of lung cancer.
A good hypothesis should not only be clear and informative, but it also needs to be measurable.
Hypotheses should be developed after studying the problem or issue as thoroughly as possible, building upon previous knowledge and observations.
