Thread: Level of detail in hypotheses

Hi all, I'm new here, hopefully posting this in the right section.

I'm currently writing a paper incorporating results from survey research. I have tested various hypotheses, but I am unsure what level of detail I should employ in my writing. If I would include every hypothesis I've tested, my paper would easily have 40 hypotheses or more. However, if I would simplify the hypotheses (group them) I fear they are not provable or falsifiable anymore...

For example, I've tested the likeliness of people using one software system also using another. Thus, H0 reads "People using a certain software system are more likely to use another one as well than people who don't use any." Because I have several systems, however, I have to conduct several tests on my dataset which yields multiple results; if, then, only some of those results are significant, should I 'partially accept' the hypothesis or reject it altogether...? The alternative would be, of course, to include a specific hypothesis for every single system, but this would enormously expand the number of hypotheses and make my paper unreadable.

How should I cope with this? Thanks for the insight.

Generally speaking, papers only incorporate one hypothesis, sometimes two if they are testing two separate problems in one paper.
40 is way too many. Either break it down into several papers, or you have to choose some to talk about in detail and then give the rest as a summary.

Thanks for your answer.

As much as I'd like to, I cannot distribute the different findings over multiple papers; on their own, there wouldn't be enough context or body to justify publication...

However, I've now worked on generalizing the hypotheses by phrasing them singular and removing the specific systems' names. That leads to a reasonable number of hypotheses; for all possibilities I now only have to explicitly state whether or not that hypothesis holds.

One of my hypotheses reads, e.g.: 'Usage of a decision-supportive system (DSS) positively influences usage of a medical system (MS).'
I then specify that it holds for DSS A & MS A, DSS B & MS A, but not for DSS A & MS B.