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blue room will report higher scores than those in the red room. They then
conduct the study to test their hypothesis.
Hypothesis testing is one of the ideals of social and behavioral research,
but much of the research that is published in the psychological literature
is more exploratory in nature. Both approaches to research, hypothesis
testing and more exploratory studies, are productive in their place, and
these approaches are not incompatible with one another. If our models
are not sufficiently formulated to frame hypotheses, then it is not often
useful to “force” hypotheses to be articulated. Instead, it is appropriate to
formulate a more general research question and engage in the exploratory
research necessary to answer that question. This more exploratory work
will eventually lead to a fuller understanding of the subject matter, which
will,inturn,allowustoconstructamorecompletemodelthatwemaybe
able to then test in a more formal way.
The ANOVA technique is equally applicable to both research strate-
gies. So long as dependent and independent variables are specified, the
statistical analysis will compare a group of scores to one or more other
groups of scores and supply us with information about the differences
between those sets of scores. With that information, researchers can either
take the results as is or can evaluate those differences with respect to any
hypotheses they have put forward.
