The characteristic of a hypotheses is, that you HAVE to clearly verify OR falsify it in your research. If your overall approach is rather explorative and/or your sampling size will not allow a distinct verification/falsification you should stick to more open research questions.

The characteristic of a hypotheses is, that you HAVE to clearly verify OR falsify it in your research. If your overall approach is rather explorative and/or your sampling size will not allow a distinct verification/falsification you should stick to more open research questions.

You could have broad research questions that each lead to set of specific, testable hypotheses. That is mostly an organizational matter. Alternatively, you could re-label your research "questions" as "topics" or "goals," which wouldn't really change anything, but it should satisfy someone who is concerned about the vocabulary involved.

The following papers may also help: 

• Farrugia, P., Petrisor, B. A., Farrokhyar, F. and Bhandari, M. (2010) Research questions, hypotheses and objectives, Canadian Journal of Surgery, 53, 4, pp. 278-281.
• Nenty, H. J. (2009) Writing a Quantitative Research Thesis, International Journal of Educational Sciences 1, 1, pp. 19-32.

Dear Debra!

Let me begin by saying that you are raising an interesting question while asking if both questions and hypotheses can be used in a research study. In spite of renowned researchers' advise that either questions or hypotheses should be used in a research study but not both, I think that a research study generally includes a main goal, one or several questions, and one or several hypotheses. So, questions and hypotheses can coexist in a research study. Note the following example, which corresponds to a line of research I have pursued for several years.

(1) My main goal in this study is to help us understand better what children's development of altruism is the development of? Note that there is amassing evidence that shows that, at least, in the first decade of life, older children share more and more generously than younger children.

(2) Main question: Why older children are more altruistic than younger ones?  Note that there are four main explanations for this phenomenon: The normative approach, the behavior- freeze theory, the cost-reward model, and the cognitive- developmental theory. You can see what each says on my publications on Research Gate related to children's development of altruism.

(3) Main hypothesis: Contrary to previous explanations, I predicted that older children share more and more generously than younger children because older children are more likely to see altruistic/prosocial acts in terms of gain (gain-construction), and younger children in terms of cost (cost-perception). In this line of research, I conceived of children’s gain-construction as a Piagetian negation, and children’s cost-perception as a Piagetian affirmation. Of course, this prediction or hypothesis could be falsified. As I see it, questions are not subject to falsification because they generally make no prediction.  Findings have shown that with increasing age children are more likely to think of pro-social acts in terms of gain-construction and negation than in terms of cost-perception. Therefore, the hypothesis at hand was not falsified, which is different from being verified. In Popperian terms a scientific hypothesis can be subject to falsification, not to verification.

(4) From this main hypothesis, I derived other hypotheses: (a) If, with increasing age, children are more likely to conceive of prosocial acts in terms of negation rather than affirmation, then I predicted that this finding should be replicated in other studies, which was found to be the case; (b) If, with increasing age, children are more likely to conceive of prosocial acts in terms of negation rather than affirmation, then I predicted that this finding should be found in different cultures in order to be a truly developmental phenomenon, which was also found to be the case; (c) If children’s altruistic/prosocial behavior is due their capacity to see it in terms of negation and gain-construction rather than affirmation and cost-perception, then negative children a la Piaget would be  more altruistic then their affirmative counterparts, which was also found to be the case; (d) If our main hypothesis is correct, then we predicted  that altruistic children would perform better in Piagetian affirmation/negation tasks than egoistic children, which was also found to be the case. Other hypotheses could be derived from our main hypothesis. For the sake of simplicity, I remain salient about these possibilities or hypotheses.

As epistemologists such as K. Popper, D. Kuhn, J. Laudan,  I. Lakatos, etc. have different conceptions of science (e,g., for Popper the more a theory is falsifiable the better it is; for Laudan, the more a research program is progressive the better it is) I do not claim to be absolutely right regarding the coexistence of hypotheses and questions in a research study. Despite this, I also think that scientists put forth hypotheses because they want to answer, say, to “irritant” questions and doubts. If there were no question to answer, hypotheses would not make much sense. This is at least what I think.

I hope that I have got Debra’s interesting and always timely question and that this helps.

Best regards

Thank you all for your feedback in helping to clarify the issue raised. Orlando, I do appreciate your sharing such a real life and pointed example that simplifies the understanding on this issue of using both questions and hypotheses in the same quantitative study.

Many thanks,

Debra

Hello Sharon: Hypotheses and research questions have been used so often in research that such occurrence(s) is/are not referred to as exceptions. Indeed both hypotheses and research questions are used in mixed methods studies where the researcher(s) are doing both a Quantitative study and a Qualitative study of the same phenomena. For example in a study of Leadership Motivations and Leadership Styles, the researcher may use hypotheses, develop questionnaires with rating scales, collect data and use statistical techniques to analyze the data. Given the gap between such research findings and the reality, a follow up Qualitative study may be done in which Research Questions are proposed, data collected and analyzed and the findings are compared with the findings of the Quantitative Study. The Qualitative study would allow one to probe moer deeply into the issue/relationship being investigated. Such a study is definitely more time-consuming but is worthwhile.