If you’re doing exploration, if you’re doing hypothesis testing, you have to have an priori hypothesis. a hypothesis has a rationale and justification, often drawn from previous hypothesis-generating studies.
You set up a plan, who are you going to sample? What are you going to measure, how you are going to measure it, how you’re going to analyze it, what the power calculations are, and then you do it as planned. That’s hypothesis testing. Hypothesis generation, or exploratory methods, basically means you don’t really have a specific plan in mind. You have sort of a general idea of the kind of thing you’re looking for, and you’re going to go out and you’re going to see what you see. And what you see is going to condition what analyses you’re going to do, and the results of those analyses are going to generate new questions that you’re going to do more analyses on, you can spend a lot of time doing this, and I will tell you this, and that is hypothesis testing is hard work.
To learn more from Dr. Helena Kraemer listen to the podcast episode below.
Part 1
Part 2
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