NOTE: This is an “extra credit” post for the 10 Days to Winning @ Work free email course. It will make more sense if you have that context first prior to reading the post below. The course is available here:
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A hypothesis is just a disprovable guess you can use as a starting point to organize your analysis. When it comes to generating and testing solid hypotheses to test and guide your work, try asking yourself these questions:
- If that were true, what would I expect to see?
- If that were false, what would I expect to see?
- How can I test that?
- Can I conduct a quick survey? (BTW: SurveyMonkey Audience, Voice Polls, and Google Consumer Surveys are what I used to determine that the world is “extremely interested” in this podcast + website… and by “the world” I mean 4% of white collar workers in the United States. Very reasonable pricing.)
- Can I pay to get a quick expert opinion? (see GLG)
- Has an experiment already been run on this? (see Google Scholar)
- Can I view representative benchmark populations?
- Can I just try it and see what happens?
- Can I throw up some quick ads in Google or Facebook to compare interest via clickthroughs?