Thompson William Hedley, Skau Simon
Department of Applied Information Technology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
R Soc Open Sci. 2023 Aug 30;10(8):230607. doi: 10.1098/rsos.230607. eCollection 2023 Aug.
Hypotheses are frequently the starting point when undertaking the empirical portion of the scientific process. They state something that the scientific process will attempt to evaluate, corroborate, verify or falsify. Their purpose is to guide the types of data we collect, analyses we conduct, and inferences we would like to make. Over the last decade, metascience has advocated for hypotheses being in preregistrations or registered reports, but how to formulate these hypotheses has received less attention. Here, we argue that hypotheses can vary in specificity along at least three independent dimensions: the relationship, the variables, and the pipeline. Together, these dimensions form the scope of the hypothesis. We demonstrate how narrowing the scope of a hypothesis in any of these three ways reduces the hypothesis space and that this reduction is a type of novelty. Finally, we discuss how this formulation of hypotheses can guide researchers to formulate the appropriate scope for their hypotheses and should aim for neither too broad nor too narrow a scope. This framework can guide hypothesis-makers when formulating their hypotheses by helping clarify what is being tested, chaining results to previous known findings, and demarcating what is explicitly tested in the hypothesis.
假设通常是开展科学过程实证部分的起点。它们陈述了科学过程将试图评估、确证、验证或证伪的内容。其目的是指导我们收集的数据类型、进行的分析以及想要做出的推断。在过去十年中，元科学主张假设应进行预注册或采用注册报告的形式，但如何构建这些假设却较少受到关注。在此，我们认为假设在特异性方面至少可以沿着三个独立维度变化：关系、变量和流程。这些维度共同构成了假设的范围。我们展示了以这三种方式中的任何一种缩小假设范围如何减少假设空间，并且这种减少是一种新颖性。最后，我们讨论这种假设构建方式如何指导研究人员为其假设制定适当的范围，且范围既不应过宽也不应过窄。这个框架可以在假设构建者构建假设时提供指导，帮助阐明正在测试的内容、将结果与先前已知的发现相联系，以及界定假设中明确测试的内容。
