First, let's define "hypothesis".



Did you ever say, "I wonder why that happens?" And then think about it, and come up with an answer?  Well, your answer at that point is a hypothesis, a guess.  If you want to find out if your guess is correct, you do an experiment.  



That's what I did with my interest in home chaos.  I found out quite a bit about it, then made some guesses.  



I guessed that homes that were NOT chaotic would also  be homes where people were organized, were communicating with each other in healthy ways, and where predictable routines, and predictable parenting were happening.  Healthy habits can be considered protective factors, meaning they help a family to function normally and to thrive.  I also figured that some unhealthy communication and emotional issues could be found in homes with lots of chaos. Unhealthy habits can be called risk factors.  For example smoking is a risk factor for cancer and heart disease.  



Now, those are the basic ideas, but there's more to it than that.  When doing psychological research, it's important to use the appropriate tools.  There are a number of different ways of finding out about a person's home environment, but it's important to match the method to the purpose.  For my purposes, the most expedient way of getting lots of data in a small amount of time was to use what is called self-report measures, also called questionnaires.  My research supervisor had books full of questionnaires for everything imaginable.  Eventually...I chose just six questionnaires.  All six measured family functions and were specifically designed to apply to the entire family, not an individual.  

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Of course, the home chaos measure was really the special one to me, since that was my main interest, and at the time, I could only find one measures of chaos available.  It's called the Chaos, Hubbub, And Order Scale, or CHAOS for short.  Only a few studies have been done using the CHAOS, but it had faired well in these studies and seemed to be a good measure.  In these studies it proved to have validity, which means it measures what it's supposed to measure, when compared to other measures.  It had mostly been compared with direct observation measures in the past.  It also was reliable, which means that CHAOS measures stayed the same when re-tests were done.  That's good news for the CHAOS, not so great for the subjects.

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So, once valid, reliable measures were chosen, my guess, or ideas, became hypotheses.  Here they are:

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Hypothesis #1:  The CHAOS will negatively correlate with measures defining protective factors in a family.​

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Hypothesis #2: The CHAOS will positively correlate with a measure defining risk factors.      ​



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