a scientific hypothesis
Our Living Language : The words hypothesis, law, and theory refer to different kinds of statements, or sets of statements, that scientists make about natural phenomena. A hypothesis is a proposition that attempts to explain a set of facts in a unified way. Hypotheses can generate predictions: statements that propose that one variable will drive some effect on or change in another variable in the result of a controlled experiment. However, many science resources promote the myth that a hypothesis is simply an educated guess and no different from a prediction. In science, a hypothesis is an idea or explanation that you then test through study and experimentation. Outside science, a theory or guess can also be called a hypothesis. A hypothesis is something more than a wild guess but less than a well-established theory. In science, a hypothesis needs to go through a lot of testing before it gets labeled a theory. In the non-scientific world, the word is used a lot more loosely. Although a theory generally contains hypotheses that are still open to revision, sometimes it is hard to know where the hypothesis ends and the law or theory begins. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, consists of statements that were originally considered to be hypotheses (and daring at that). Forming a Hypothesis. The first step of a psychological investigation is to identify an area of interest and develop a hypothesis that can then be tested. While a hypothesis is often described as a hunch or a guess, it is actually much more specific. A hypothesis can be defined as an educated guess about the relationship between two or more variables. For example, a researcher might be interested in the relationship between study habits and test anxiety. A theory is a set of statements, including laws and hypotheses, that explains a group of observations or phenomena in terms of those laws and hypotheses. A theory thus accounts for a wider variety of events than a law does. a proposition, or 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 investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts. Two Parts:Preparing to Write a HypothesisFormulating Your HypothesisCommunity Q&A. A hypothesis is a description of a pattern in nature or an explanation about some real-world phenomenon that can be tested through observation and experimentation. They would then propose a hypothesis about how these two variables are related, such as test anxiety decreases as a result of effective study habits.. In order to form a hypothesis, you must start by collecting as many observations about something as you can. Next, it is important to evaluate these observations and look for possible causes of the problem. Create a list of possible explanations that you might want to explore. The most common way a hypothesis is used in scientific research is as a tentative, testable, and falsifiable statement that explains some observed phenomenon in nature. We more specifically call this kind of statement an explanatory hypothesis. However, a hypothesis can also be a statement that describes an observed pattern in nature. In this case we call the statement a generalizing hypothesis.
It is an idea or explanation that you then test through study and experimentation.