What is hypothesis? Critically evaluate the significance of hypothesis in social research. (Answer in 150 words)

- What is hypothesis? Critically evaluate the significance of hypothesis in social research. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
A hypothesis disciplines enquiry; sociology has done good work with one and without.

Body

1. What a hypothesis is: A testable proposition stating an expected relation between variables, framed so that evidence could refute it. Goode and Hatt required it to be clear, empirically grounded, specific and within reach of technique. Statistically it is tested as a null of no relation.

2. What it contributes and where it obstructs: It turns a vague interest into a question with a method attached: the variables, the data and the test that would defeat it — Popper's requirement. Merton's middle-range theories are fertile because they generate hypotheses. But a prediction fixed in advance narrows what can be seen, and exploratory work is better without one: Glaser and Strauss built grounded theory on categories emerging from data, and Blumer preferred sensitising concepts to fixed variables.

3. A verdict: Significant but not universal — indispensable where a relation is to be tested, dispensable where a phenomenon has still to be described.

Conclusion
The test of a hypothesis is that it could have failed.