9th December Comments
09 Friday Dec 2011
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in09 Friday Dec 2011
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in09 Friday Dec 2011
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inIs it possible to prove a research hypothesis?
I would argue that the short answer is no.
Firstly it is much easier to disprove anything than to prove it; for example the world is not flat, the moon is not made of cheese and you will not die if you don’t pass on that chain mail. How do we know these? Because they have been disproved, we have images from space showing a spherical earth, astronaughts went to the moon and devastingly found out it wouldn’t taste good on crackers and there are no recorded cases of people dying from not forwarding emails as far as I’m aware.
A hypothesis cannot be proved unless no one can ever disprove it which is simply not possible in psychology; using a basic example a hypothesis could be made that every patient with anorexia nervosa has struggled to gain weight since a young age, you could find 60234 patients this applies to but it can still be disproved; the next day someone may discover a patient who this does not apply to and your hypothesis has been disproved, a process known as falsification which is notoriously difficult in many areas of psychology- just look at Freud’s theories. Unless you can eliminate every possible variable which could disprove your research hypothesis you cannot ever prove it completely. To prove a hypothesis you need an absolute truth and absolute truth never changes and cannot be added to; for something to be absolute truth you would have to eliminate every variable and test every member of the population you were studying. Repeating is what the majority of scientific knowledge is based on; hypothesizes become accepted when they have been repeatedly experiemented on and produced consistent results.
Although on a counter argument perhaps this is why we have the null hypothesis; going on my earlier example of anorexia sufferers the null hypothesis could be that not all patients will have experienced struggles to gain weight at a younger age; you have technically proven your null hypothesis.
In conclusion, null hypothesizes can sometimes be proven but going back to the original topic it is extremely difficult to prove a research hypothesis for the simple reason that it only takes one individual, event, etc to disprove the hypothesis and it is virtually impossible to remove every variable and study every single person, event, etc and the existence of an absolute truth in psychology is debatable.
Happy Christmas 🙂