Refuting a hypothesis in a dissertation I am writing my dissertation, and things came out somewhat different to what I had thought three years ago. Back then, I had three hypotheses. Two turned out to be true. The third, last and flimsiest, looks false. The question is: how should I describe the third hypothesis in the short list of hypotheses?


I could phrase it the way I did three years ago. In the results and conclusions section, I could try refuting it.
I could phrase it the other way around, as if I always thought it was untrue. There a billion problems to that, the least being: how does one then describe the experimental plan? I can't really say I wanted the null hypothesis to come true? Surely different kinds of experiments would have been more useful.
I could leave that section out. That is madness, it's a lot of work down the drain.
It is hard to give good advice on this without knowing the concrete dissertation and the expectations of your community. Hence, this is one of those famous questions where the right answer really is ask your advisor.

However, in the dark I am not sure why you would not just use Option 1 from your list - you had a (hopefully reasonable) hypothesis, you set up experiments and tested it, and found no evidence to support your hypothesis. Assuming that the hypothesis wasn't bad to begin with and the experiments were sound, why can't you just write it down like this?