Examples of Hypothesis Testing in Research [WLOs: 1,2] [CLOs: 1,4,5] Locate an e
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Examples of Hypothesis Testing in Research [WLOs: 1,2] [CLOs: 1,4,5] Locate an example of a research study that uses hypothesis testing. Explain whether the study describes its hypothesis testing procedure explicitly or implicitly, based on the explanations in the Methodology section. Finally discuss what this statistical technique allowed the researchers to accomplish and/or conclude in the study Guided Response: Review the posts from your classmates, and respond to at least two. In each response, compare how the hypothesis testing procedure was approached in the research studies you and your classmate provided. noting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.Explanation / Answer
Hypothesis Testing
When you conduct a piece of quantitative research, you are inevitably attempting to answer a research question or hypothesis that you have set. One method of evaluating this research question is via a process called hypothesis testing, which is sometimes also referred to as significance testing. Since there are many facets to hypothesis testing, we start with the example we refer to throughout this guide.The first step in hypothesis testing is to set a research hypothesis. In Sarah and Mike's study, the aim is to examine the effect that two different teaching methods – providing both lectures and seminar classes (Sarah), and providing lectures by themselves (Mike) – had on the performance of Sarah's 50 students and Mike's 50 students. More specifically, they want to determine whether performance is different between the two different teaching methods. Whilst Mike is skeptical about the effectiveness of seminars, Sarah clearly believes that giving seminars in addition to lectures helps her students do better than those in Mike's class. This leads to the following research hypothesis:
Research Hypothesis: When students attend seminar classes, in addition to lectures, their performance increases.
Before moving onto the second step of the hypothesis testing process, we need to take you on a brief detour to explain why you need to run hypothesis testing at all. This is explained next.If you have measured individuals (or any other type of "object") in a study and want to understand differences (or any other type of effect), you can simply summarize the data you have collected. For example, if Sarah and Mike wanted to know which teaching method was the best, they could simply compare the performance achieved by the two groups of students – the group of students that took lectures and seminar classes, and the group of students that took lectures by themselves – and conclude that the best method was the teaching method which resulted in the highest performance. However, this is generally of only limited appeal because the conclusions could only apply to students in this study. However, if those students were representative of all statistics students on a graduate management degree, the study would have wider appeal.
In statistics terminology, the students in the study are the sample and the larger group they represent (i.e., all statistics students on a graduate management degree) is called the population. Given that the sample of statistics students in the study are representative of a larger population of statistics students, you can use hypothesis testing to understand whether any differences or effects discovered in the study exist in the population. In layman's terms, hypothesis testing is used to establish whether a research hypothesis extends beyond those individuals examined in a single study.
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