Is hypothesis-driven research the only type of research?
A researcher at a talk I attended made the statement that hypothesis-driven research is the only valid type of research. His point was that taking the time to form a hypothesis served to focus the researcher on the key parts of experimental design.
Generally, I do not agree with absolutes (see what I did there), and this one is no exception. I think valuable research-that is discovery of something new- can be accomplished without a clear hypothesis at the outset. It is difficult, and regularly operating without a hypothesis can lead to ambiguous results, but I think real hypothesis-lacking research is possible.
I agree it’s possible, but methodically I think it will be messy and disordered. the equivalent of a child running to different parts of a playground at random to try things out.
Hypothesis driven research does often seem to be a one-track deal with not many huge discoveries made that create new fields of science. But every now and then people get surprising results that have the potential to do so.
ScienceDefined
February 6, 2012 at 5:52 pm
Hello ScienceDefined,
Thank you for commenting on the post. I agree that well-designed, hypothesis-driven research will produce clearer results. I am interested in the comparision of hypothesis-driven verses true “fishing” expeditions because the impedements to fishing have decreased. We are able to catalog the vast amounts of data produced by these types of experiments. We still don’t have really good tools for analyzing the data. I wrote an earlier post on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in mental health research. I think of GWAS as a hypothesis-light research tool. Your hypothesis is that one (or more) gene in the whole genome is associated with increased risk of developing your disorder of interest. There are no a priori assumptions based on known biological function. I think as we increase our ability to digest large data sets, hypotheses in the traditional sense will become more ambiguous.
fjordmaster
February 7, 2012 at 12:39 pm