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Draft
of Hypothesis Section
You eventually will place your hypotheses section directly after your literature
review in your final paper (due later). Remember, researchers conduct a literature
review to help their readers understand the extent of our current knowledge about
a particular topic while also pointing out what we still don't know. The questions
that a researcher attempts to answer are based largely upon their literature review.
Therefore, your first sentence in the hypothesis section should be, "Based upon my
literature review, I have formed the following hypotheses." (or something very similar)
Next,
1. List your three hypotheses and why you expect to support them
(e.g., why does the prior research, your experience, and/or logic suggest that your
hypotheses are correct?). If your 2 earlier hypotheses were written properly, you
likely can copy them to this stage unaltered, although you may change them slightly
if you wish. If the instructor noted errors on the 2 prior hypotheses, they should
be fixed. The 3rd hypothesis that you will add must contain a control variable (see
below).
2. Provide an explanation of how your research (the hypotheses you
are testing) is similar to or different from the research in your literature review
(e.g., prior research tested a similar hypothesis, but my hypothesis is different
because... or, prior research examined this hypothesis, but it did so only using
a small sample from the state of Texas. We do not know, however, if the findings
will hold using a representative sample of respondents from across the entire United
States).
A comment about the 3rd hypothesis and control variables
Your 3rd hypothesis must include a control
variable.
Control variables are a difficult concept to learn about in your first research
methods class.
Your control variable should be something that possibly could cause both the independent
variable (IV) and the dependent variable (DV) (which would lead to a spurious causal
interpretation of the association between your IV and DV if the control were absent
from your analysis) or some factor that may be correlated with the IV (which similarly
will lead to an incorrect interpretation of the association between your IV and
DV if the control were absent). Gender, Age, and Race are common control variables
and you may use one of these if you wish.
Your control variable is another variable almost identical to the independent variable.
For the purposes of this class, is is often easiest to consider the independent
variable to be the primary thing that you wish to consider as having a potential
effect on the dependent variable and the control variable as a less-important thing
that you wish to consider.
An example of a hypothesis containing a control variable
Hypothesis 1 and 2 contain a single IV and a single DV. Hypothesis 3 contains an
IV, a DV, and a control variable:
Hypothesis 1: Women are more likely than are men to plan to have children
Hypothesis 2: Individuals who attend church more often are less likely to plan to
have children than individuals who attend church less often.
Hypothesis 3: Controlling for gender, individuals who attend church more often are
less likely to plan to have children than individuals who attend church less often.
The last hypothesis is an elaboration of the first two. It is quite possible that
women attend church more often than do men. Therefore, if we are examining the effect
of church attendance on family planning, we might really be examining the effect
of gender on family planning. In order to differentiate these two possibilities,
we must include both gender and church attendance in the same analysis - in other
words, we must control for gender.
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