Choosing a Research Question: Developing a Hypothesis and Objectives Part 3

Now that you focused down that question, you need to turn this into a hypothesis or a description. So, people often talk about hypothesis-driven research. But if you're just doing a description, like how many people in the hospital get disease X? That is not a hypothesis. You are just describing something. And what that is, is actually usually hypothesis generating research.

So, you may want to use that information. So, I recently did a scientific review that wanted to look at comparing outcomes in patients before and after they had instituted a new treatment -- a new guideline for testing people for tuberculosis in their system. And they wanted to see what impact implementing that guideline actually had.

So, the guideline had only gone into effect literally a year ago. So, one of our questions was, do you even know how many people are going to have tested positive for TB in the last year? Because if it's two people, you're not going to have much to analyze in that timeframe. So, they needed to do that descriptive piece

first before they could go test their hypothesis. So, what is a hypothesis? So, a hypothesis is not a question. It's a statement. It's a statement about what the investigators believe to be true about nature, and the relationships of two or more variables to each other. So, in other words, a hypothesis doesn't say,

I am going to find out whether drug X is better than drug Y. A hypothesis is drug X is better than drug Y. And then you formulate a question around that. A hypothesis almost always entails a comparison, but all research is not comparative, as I've said. So, you need to differentiate qualitative from quantitative research and descriptive from analytical research.