I. Introduction.
a. Depending on your orientation and the nature of your research question, you should express your research question as either testable hypotheses or sensitizing concepts and questions.
i. Quantitative researchers tend to express their research question as testable hypotheses. However, some exploratory quantitative studies might use sensitizing concepts and questions, but this is less common.
ii. Qualitative researchers typically do not develop explicit hypotheses. They prefer sensitizing concepts and questions. Again, however, some qualitative researchers develop and test hypothesis, but this is less common.
iii. If you are interested in the effect of social forces on behavior, want to know "the facts" about social life, and like causal explanations and relationships, you will most likely prefer quantitative methods and should probably develop testable hypotheses.
iv. If you are interested in how people make sense of and understand their everyday experiences, how they order and organized their interactions, how they perceive and define reality, and prefer typologies and narrative descriptions over causal explanations, you will most likely prefer qualitative methods and should develop sensitizing concepts and questions.
b. Determining whether qualitative or quantitative research is best for you.
i. Look at your choice of topic and the types of research questions that interest you.
ii. Questions that ask about causes and consequences, how variables are related, make comparison, or that look at effects "social forces" on behavior should probably be addressed using quantitative methods.
iii. Questions about how people make sense of, perceive, understand and assign meaning to things; or that focus on the way groups come to define and see the world should probably be addressed using qualitative research.
iv. If you are not sure which method to use, you should probably use quantitative methods. Most people think more like quantitative sociologists than qualitative sociologists and quantitative research is easier to design.
II. Developing Testable Hypotheses.
a. Hypotheses are statements about the empirical world that are logically derived from theory. They express theory in ways that can be empirically observed and verified. They typically express relationships between two or more variables.
i. Hypotheses are statements, not questions.
ii. Hypotheses must be empirically verifiable.
1. Avoid tautological and teleological hypotheses.
2. Be sure the variables can be observed and measured.
b. Stating your research question as a testable hypothesis.
i. Consider possible answers to your research questions?
1. What does theory suggest the answers to your questions might be?
2. What does previous research suggest the answers to your questions might be?
ii. Develop statements that answer your research question(s).
1. Come up with statements you believe to be true based on theory or previous research.
2. Don't ask questions, make statements.
iii. Develop testable hypotheses by expressing your statement(s) in terms of relationships between variables.
1. Indicate time order by clearly indicating the independent, dependent, and intervening variables.
a. The characteristic, attitude, pattern or behavior you are trying to explain is your dependent variable.
b. The characteristics, attitudes, patterns or behaviors that precede and influence, affect, or cause change in your dependent variable are your independent variables.
c. If the effects of the independent variables pass through or change depending on other variables, these other variables are called intervening variables.
2. Indicate the type of causal relationships.
a. Direct.
b. Indirect.
c. Interaction.
3. Indicate the type of association between the variables.
a. Positive associations.
b. Negative associations.
c. Curvilinear associations.
d. Non-directional associations.
e. No association (spuriousness).
4. Develop a path model if appropriate.
a. Multiple variables, multiple hypothesis, multiple causal connections.
b. Diagramming hypothesized relationships.
c. The path model as hypothesis.
c. Evaluating your hypotheses.
i. Be sure your hypotheses are statements, not questions.
ii. Be sure your hypotheses are empirically verifiable.
iii. Be sure your hypotheses are clear, explicit, and concise.
iv. Be sure your hypotheses are not double-barreled.
d. Examples.
III. Developing Sensitizing Concepts and Questions.
a. Sensitizing concepts and questions are concepts, ideas, notions, or questions that guide observations and data collection in inductive qualitative research and some exploratory quantitative research.
i. Inductive qualitative research and grounded theory.
ii. The myth of the blank slate.
iii. Sensitizing concepts and questions are the starting point. They inform the researcher where to look, for what to look, and may give him/her some idea of what they can expect to see. In the latter sense, they serve as pseudo-hypotheses.
iv. Sensitizing concepts and questions often evolve over the course of a research project.
b. Developing sensitizing concepts and questions.
i. Using theory and previous research.
ii. Acknowledging your interests and (perhaps) biases.
iii. Presenting and discussing your sensitizing concepts.
c. Examples.