Abstract:
Hypothesis testing is probably one of the fundamental
concepts in academic research especially where one wishes to
proof a theory, logic or principle. Business and social research
embeds several theories and established principles whose
application in practice requires testing, and hypothesis testing
comes in handy. Whereas the importance of hypothesis testing
cannot be overemphasized, the procedure for hypothesis testing
including setting up hypotheses by social scientists is not very
clear. What is more, the conventional understanding of hypotheses
testing may often lead to misleading interpretation. This purpose
of this paper is to simplify the concepts is hypothesis testing. We
use analysis of theoretical literature and simple illustrations to
demonstrate use of hypothesis testing in business and social
sciences studies. This paper concludes that a researcher wishing to
test hypothesis should conceptualize a thesis or claim well in
advance before collection of data. The claim can be drawn from
theory or principles in various fields of study. We show that the
only way to prove the claim under study is to proof that the counter
claim is false. This is the rationale behind the setting of Null and
Alternative hypothesis. We showed that it is the onus of the
researcher to collect evidence to prove that the null hypothesis is
false for us to conclude that our claim as stated in alternative
hypothesis is true. Awareness of type I and II errors have also been
highlighted as an important concern for researchers wishing to
adopt hypothesis testing
