# Is it possible to get a null hypothesis from this? If so, what would it be?

I have been working on this for the past 4 hours.. sadly. I need to get the null and alternative hypothesis from an article that states a p value, and I chose this one.

Volume 39, Number 2, March-April 2015, American Journal of Health behavior, "Subjective Social Status and Readiness to Quit among Homeless Smokers."

It seems that the hypothesis (the one of many I chose) is "Higher SSS Community rankings will relate to greater readiness to quit." However, I am not sure how I could convert that to a null/alt hypothesis seeing as I don't know what numbers for me to set a mean equal to. The paper contains a lot but in my attempt to summarize, it attempts to show that a higher SSS rating (perception of your own status in the social hierarchy) among homeless people is linked to a higher readiness to smoke.

To simplify, how to I get both hypotheses (null/alt) in an article such as the listed when it isn't layed out in a nice question format such as what I am used to? What is the null and alternative in this situation?

What I understand so far and seem to be the information necessary to know is this:

The readiness to quit smoking at the lowest SSS Community (1) is -.03 and for the highest SSS Community (9) is .32, so the hypothesis is true since more are ready to quit if the SSS is higher. The probability is is "p < .001"

My problem is, I don't know how to put it into the format I was taught, which is Ho: (Mu) = x I am not sure how to take the information I have and get the two hypotheses.

• Please add the [self-study] tag & read its wiki. Then tell us what you understand thus far, what you've tried & where you're stuck. We'll provide hints to help you get unstuck. – gung - Reinstate Monica Aug 5 '15 at 23:05
• Also, please paste into the body of your question whatever context is necessary to understand it. Eg, provide a complete citation for the paper (in case the link goes dead), & paste quoted text from the paper (perhaps w/ terms defined or whatever is necessary). – gung - Reinstate Monica Aug 5 '15 at 23:07
• The "format you were taught" seems to be for a very specific kind of test, where you're comparing a mean to a prespecified value (likely a one-sample t-test). There are dozens of other tests in common use. The paper looks like it's testing whether a correlation is zero (or not zero under the alternative), which is similar to what you're familiar with, but somewhat different. – Glen_b -Reinstate Monica Aug 6 '15 at 7:38