How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

Research Questions and Hypotheses
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ing skills. They may even need to conduct a preliminary investigation to further
tease out and clarify questions. Accordingly, the right place for a precise statement
of the research questions may indeed be at the point where the background chapters
finish, and just before the start of the core of your own work, but the questions need
to be stated in broad terms in your first chapter.
Now, as for hypotheses, let me tell you about Daud, who came to me wishing to
do a Masters. When I asked him what the aim of his project was, he replied that it
was to demonstrate that development in his home country, one of the African nations,
depended crucially on the adequate provision of household energy supplies.
This is a hypothesis, not an aim. (An aim here might be to investigate the relationship
between national development and the availability of household energy supplies.)
This confusion is very common. More often than not, when I ask potential
research students what the aim of their research is, they reply with a hypothesis. The
confusion seems to be due to a looseness of expression among research workers
when talking about research. As discussed in Chap. 2, research is a complex mixture
of creative and rational processes. As a result, it is quite common to leap right into
the middle of the research process with a hypothesis, and work backwards to the
aim and forwards to the conclusions at the same time.
However, no matter how irrational and chancy an actual investigation is, the
output of research must be written such that it is argued logically and clearly. Therefore
you must eliminate any confusion between aim and hypothesis. An aim is to do
with directing something towards an object, whereas a hypothesis is a proposition
made as a starting point for further investigation from known facts. 1 Clearly the two
words have quite different meanings, and should not be used interchangeably.
To be fair to Daud, he was not really confusing the two things. He was giving me
hypotheses, or propositions that could be tested. He had perceived problems, and
had developed hypotheses about them in his unconscious thoughts over a period of
time, long before he had come to me to propose a plan for research. When he came
to see me he had not yet worked his way back from a hypothesis to an aim. He was
focused on what he could do in his study, rather than what he was trying to achieve.
When I explain the difference, referring to the dictionary if necessary, students
often reply that their aim is to ‘prove’ their hypothesis. This is not an aim either!
Proving is what we do to hypotheses, at least in the sense of ‘proving’ as testing
(as in ‘proving ground’). A hypothesis is a device that enables researchers to set up
useful tests or experiments that will tell them whether they are on the right track. It
is not the arrow pointing to the destination.
A suggestion, then, is that you not use the word ‘hypothesis’ in the opening
chapter of your thesis. In a recent seminar a student told me that her supervisor said
1
GW Turner (ed.), The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,
1987. ‘Consider an archer: her aim is to put the arrow in the bull’s eye. She might have a
hypothesis that if she was shooting in a northerly direction and the wind was blowing from the east
at 10 m per second she would have to shoot at a point 2° to the right of the bull’s eye. She could
quite easily test this hypothesis by shooting a group of arrows at the bull’s eye and another group
2° to the right. When she had tested her hypothesis she would be in a better position to achieve her
original aim, which was to get arrows in the bull’s eye.’