Here is an outline of how hypotheses grow out of theories. We will go over it in class. It should help think about hypotheses. It includes theories, methods and facts.
Theory offers an explanation of why something is the way it is.
Concepts are the critical ingredients of theories and focus our attention on the key phenomena that are involved in explaining why something is the way it is. Hypotheses state predictions of what the facts will support. Hypotheses take a theory and its concepts and convert it into an observable relationship between variables. Variables convert, or as they say in the research literature, operationalize concepts into observable measures. Now, let s relate this to where we are in this course, the first assignment, etc.