To have hypothesis or not?

As a result of research proposal presentation assignment in class, students are beginning to structure their research ideas into consistent and logical manners, following a few standard subtitles taught in class.  In the process of doing so, students are triggered to think through very carefully the links between ideas and how they help to solve research problem they identified or achieve research objectives they set to achieve. Thus, tutor and I are beginning to receive a lot of questions from students. I must say this is a positive development, at least we know students are learning.

Similarly, supervisors also are very involved in students’ proposal at this stage, now that proposal report is almost due for submission. There are debates among supervisors whether "hypothesis development" is a compulsory section in a research proposal. I have to agree with some supervisors that "hypothesis" is not always possible to develop, especially in "Exploratory" type of research where the topic has not been explored in the literature before.

A compulsory section in a research proposal which is quite similar to Hypothesis, is "research objectives" section. Research objective guides or directs the research process. Hypothesis is derived from research objective, hypothesis is an educated guess stated in testable form, to help achieve a research objective. Since all research types (regardless of quantitative, qualitative, primary data, secondary data, exploratory, empirical validation) are guided by “research objectives”, thus hypothesis development criteria in presentation assessment form is considered fulfilled if research objectives are clearly explained.

Thanks for the feedback from students and supervisors, intellectual debate such as this, helps in creating high quality research!