Now I am ready to test my hypothesis. To do this, I need to set up a null hypothesis (H₀) and an alternative hypothesis (H₁) in statistical form. Statistical hypotheses are always expressed as population parameters. Here are my hypotheses.

I think that college students today have less social interaction than they did in the past; that is why my population mean (μ) for H₁ is less than 6.0. The null hypothesis (H₀) is what is known from previous studies; college students spent 6.0 hours a day or more in face-to-face social interaction. Now we test the null, to see if we can reject it in favor of the alternative. (If this seems odd, you might want to look at the digression.)