Formulating a working hypothesis for your research paper can be one of the hardest tasks in the research writing process. While you could simply choose to ignore having one, it is the most important statement that guides your work.

But what is a hypothesis anyway?

A hypothesis refers to a testable statement that is used to guide your investigation. It shapes how we will collect and analyze the data and is therefore very critical in the research process.

There are only two types of hypotheses in existence, a null hypothesis, and an alternative hypothesis. The latter is also known as the research hypothesis.

It is imperative to note that you can only have one type of hypothesis at a time. This rule works around consistency throughout your paper and prevents the chances of getting confused along the way.

Now that you are conversant with the scientific process for any research and that you have identified the research problem that interests you, you might already have some ideas. To formulate a working hypothesis, you will only need the ideas that you already have and correct wording.

Writing one isn’t that hard, right? Here is a more elaborate approach to write yours fast.

The three-step hypothesis writing process

Step1: Formulate a general hypothesis – in this stage you only have to generally compose an overall hypothesis to work with. Given that you have been gathering information and reviewing literature around the identified research problem, you must have come up with some angle or perspective on how variables seem to interact on the subject. For instance, Assume that you are working on a fish farm and you discover that tilapia fish are attacked with parasites more during the warmer months in summer when the water levels shrink compared to the colder season. You can quickly propose a general-purpose hypothesis that water levels affect parasite numbers suffered by tilapia. But this doesn’t provide a clear direction to follow.

Step2: Refining the general hypothesis – To give direction on which research design to follow and type of experiment to adopt, you will need to refine the proposed general hypothesis. You might take a while in this stage as you subject the hypothesis to thorough evaluations giving varied versions. Despite how refined a particular version might seem, always ask yourself if it is testable. To know whether it measures up to this parameter, you will need to keep an eye on whether it shows or suggests a relationship or interaction between the independent variable and the dependent or controlled variables. For example, tilapia suffers increased parasitic attacks in low-level waters because of decreased oxygen levels, which is a testable hypothesis that you can work with.

Stage3: Test the refined hypothesis – once you have refined your hypothesis, it will guide you on what research design to use in testing it. This includes the type of statistical approach to follow. After statistically analyzing the collected data, you can now use your findings to either reject or accept the null version of your hypothesis statement. The scientific process of testing hypothesis strives at improving research quality and increasing accuracy in findings.