Demystifying hypothesis testing in business and social sciences studies

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