Research questions and hypotheses
1 Research questions
Research questions are testable questions whose answers directly address the problem.
They take the form of actual questions:
- What is the average speech rate of adolescents vs that of older adults?
- What happens to infants syntactic processing when they move from a monolingual to a multilingual environment?
- Is the morphological complexity of languages spoken by larger populations different from that of languages spoken by smaller populations?
Research questions are always necessary, independent of the type and objective of the research.
While there is an undue pressure on researcher to come up with “novel” research questions all the time, it is perfectly fine to ask the same question multiple times.
2 Research hypotheses
Research hypotheses are statements (not questions) about the research problem.
Hypotheses must be falsifiable (there can be in principle an outcome that shows them to be false). See below.
Hypotheses are never true nor confirmed. We can only corroborate hypothesis, and it’s a long term process. The same hypothesis has to be tested again and again, but multiple researchers in multiple contexts.
Research is not a one-off matter: knowledge can only be acquired slowly and with a lot of effort.
It is however perfectly fine to run a study with only research questions, without a research hypothesis. As long as you clearly state whether you are talking about research questions or research hypotheses, you are fine.
2.1 Falsifiability
You might be wondering what it is meant by “falsifiable” statements. From Seven examples of falsifiability by John Spacey:
A statement is falsifiable if it can be contradicted by an observation. If such observation is impossible to make with current technology, falsifiability is not achieved.
Some examples of falsifiable hypotheses:
- “Life only exists on Earth.” (it would be falsified by the observation of life somewhere else).
- “If there is a 1st person exclusive dual, then there is also a 1st person inclusive dual.” [Universal 1871] (it would be falsified by the observation of languages with a 1st person exclusive dual but without the incluve alternative).
- “Infants start uttering full sentences only after their 12th month of life.” (it would be falsified by the observation of infants uttering full sentences before their 12th month of life).
And some examples of non-falsifiable hypotheses.
- “Life might exist outside of the Solar system.” (if we observe life outside the Solar system or we don’t, the statement is still true).
- “Languages with a 1st person inclusive dual can have a 1st person exclusive dual.” (whether we observe a language with both 1st inclusive and exclusive dual or not, the statement is still true.)