Hypothesis Testing

Dominik Hangartner & Jeff Gill

The primary means of conveying the strength of empirical findings in political science is the null hypothesis significance test (NHST). This paradigm, along with its strengths and weaknesses, is therefore important for nearly every quantitative study in political science. This entry reviews the current hypothesis testing paradigm and its history, discusses the underused idea of statistical power from tests, and points out some common misinterpretations of hypothesis testing. The current approach to hypothesis testing in all of the social sciences is a synthesis of the Fisher test of significance and the Neyman-Pearson hypothesis test. In this 20th-century procedure, two hypotheses are set forth: a null or restricted hypothesis, H 0 , which is set against an alternative or research hypothesis, H 1 . Thus, they are supposed to describe two complementary notions about some political science phenomenon of interest. The research hypothesis is the probability model that describes the author's ...

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