The Null and Alternative Hypotheses and Errors in Hypothesis Testing
One of the authors’ former students is employed by a major television network in the standards and practices division. One of the division’s responsibilities is to reduce the chances that advertisers will make false claims in commercials run on the network. Our former student reports that the network uses a statistical methodology called hypothesis testing to do this.
Chapter 9
To see how this might be done, suppose that a company wishes to advertise a claim, and suppose that the network has reason to doubt that this claim is true. The network assumes for the sake of argument that the claim is not valid. This assumption is called the null hypothesis. The statement that the claim is valid is called the alternative, or research, hypothesis. The network will run the commercial only if the company making the claim provides sufficient sample evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the claim is not valid in favor of the alternative hypothesis that the claim is valid. Explaining the exact meaning of sufficient sample evidence is quite involved and will be discussed in the next section.