hypothesis child meaning

What is a hypothesis?

No.  A hypothesis is sometimes described as an educated guess.  That's not the same thing as a guess and not really a good description of a hypothesis either.  Let's try working through an example.

If you put an ice cube on a plate and place it on the table, what will happen?  A very young child might guess that it will still be there in a couple of hours.  Most people would agree with the hypothesis that:

An ice cube will melt in less than 30 minutes.

You could put sit and watch the ice cube melt and think you've proved a hypothesis.  But you will have missed some important steps.

For a good science fair project you need to do quite a bit of research before any experimenting.  Start by finding some information about how and why water melts.  You could read a book, do a bit of Google searching, or even ask an expert.  For our example, you could learn about how temperature and air pressure can change the state of water.  Don't forget that elevation above sea level changes air pressure too.

Now, using all your research, try to restate that hypothesis.

An ice cube will melt in less than 30 minutes in a room at sea level with a temperature of 20C or 68F.

But wait a minute.  What is the ice made from?  What if the ice cube was made from salt water, or you sprinkled salt on a regular ice cube?  Time for some more research.  Would adding salt make a difference?  Turns out it does.  Would other chemicals change the melting time?

Using this new information, let's try that hypothesis again.

An ice cube made with tap water will melt in less than 30 minutes in a room at sea level with a temperature of 20C or 68F.

Does that seem like an educated guess?  No, it sounds like you are stating the obvious.

At this point, it is obvious only because of your research.  You haven't actually done the experiment.  Now it's time to run the experiment to support the hypothesis.

A hypothesis isn't an educated guess.  It is a tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation.

Once you do the experiment and find out if it supports the hypothesis, it becomes part of scientific theory.

Notes to Parents:

• Every parent must use their own judgment in choosing which activities are safe for their own children.  While Science Kids at Home makes every effort to provide activity ideas that are safe and fun for children it is your responsibility to choose the activities that are safe in your own home.
• Science Kids at Home has checked the external web links on this page that we created.  We believe these links provide interesting information that is appropriate for kids.  However, the internet is a constantly changing place and these links may not work or the external web site may have changed.  We also have no control over the "Ads by Google" links, but these should be related to kids science and crafts.  You are responsible for supervising your own children.  If you ever find a link that you feel is inappropriate, please let us know.

Kids Science Gifts   Science Experiments   Science Fair Projects   Science Topics   Creative Kids Blog

Kids Crafts   Privacy Policy   Copyright © 2016 Science Kids at Home, all rights reserved.

Starting from 9.99$/mo (billed annually) Unlimited live and on-demand classes & activities.

• Find an expert now

Starting from 9.99$/mo (billed annually) Unlimited live and on-demand classes & activities New classes added every month.

Hypothesizing: How Toddlers Use Scientific Thinking to Learn

Can Toddlers Hypothesize?

Yes, but it’s simplified at this age. Toddlers tend to be less vocal when they make an observation or a hypothesis, often internalizing their thoughts instead.

You might see your toddler dump and refill a container of blocks several times, focusing intently on watching the blocks fall out over and over again. As your little one watches, they might consider what will happen if they added more blocks to dump out, or if kicking the container over will have a different outcome than using their hands to tip it over.

Hypothesizing in the toddler years relies heavily on cause and effect awareness , which develops through toddlerhood and into the preschool years. Toddlers learn what happens when they do certain things, such as making banging sounds when they hit a box. Each time a toddler changes how they play with something, they see a different outcome, which lays the foundation for forming predictions.

So every time you see your little one repeating the same things, or switching them up slightly, they’re working on the cause and effect awareness that leads to scientific thinking!

Hypothesizing and Scientific Exploration at Work in Toddlerhood

Scientific exploration is much more than simply science! It involves planning, critical thinking, and problem-solving – skills at the heart of learning in general. Scientific exploration relies on observing, asking questions, making predictions, and testing things out.

Here’s how the scientific thinking process might look in a toddler who’s playing with toy trucks:

• Observing: Your toddler rolls the truck across the floor, watching its wheels move. Your cat walks by and pushes another truck with its paw, sending it soaring across the room as your toddler watches.
• Asking questions: Your toddler wonders why that truck moved faster than the one in their hands.
• Hypothesizing: Your toddler pushes the truck with one hand, sending the truck zooming across the floor.
• Predicting: Seeing the truck move faster, your toddler might think that pushing the truck with both hands could make it go even faster still.
• Testing: Your toddler uses their hands to push the toy across the floor again and again. Eventually, they try other ways of moving the truck, like kicking it with their feet and rolling it off the edge of a chair.

In this example, your little one made it through a complete cycle of scientific thinking with just one toy! Hypothesizing is a pivotal piece of that process, requiring them to problem-solve in. order to achieve a specific outcome.

How can you help your toddler hypothesize and think scientifically? Play! You could ask questions that help them think, such as, “What do you think would happen if…” or “Do you think your picture would look different if we colored it with markers instead of crayons?” Even if your toddler doesn’t have an answer, you’re engaging their thinking skills.

You can find fun ways to engage your little one’s scientific thinking in our BabySparks program!

• cognitive development
• problem solving
• cause and effect

ACTIVITY PACKAGE:

Form of Payment

Number of children:

x per child

Total Amount

SELECT YOUR METHOD OF PAYMENT

BabySparks Premium Gives You…

Access to 1,300+ development activities & milestones An expert-created program to support the development of children under your care Tools to increase family engagement, invite each family to use the program at home Ability to track each child's progress in real-time (and share it with his/her family) Add unlimited children, caregivers and locations to your account Manage and track progress across your organization through our desktop dashboard Cancel your subscription at any time

Your account

Change your password, update payment method.

Your Activity Package

Update your package at any time.

How does it work?

You can change your activity package at any time. The change will take place at the end of your current subscription period. You will only be charged the new rate once the change takes place.

Curious about what to expect from your child this month?

From 0-36 months

Let us know your child's age and we will send you FREE monthly updates with key milestones, helpful parenting tips, and more!

Forgot your password?

Create Your Account

Already Have an Account? Login

Select Your Activity Package

Access to 1,300+ development activities & milestones An expert-created program to support your child’s development Weekly development reports summarize progress Browse activities for any situation Expert-written articles about development Sync up to 5 devices (add family and caregivers) Add up to 5 babies to your account Cancel your susbcription at any time

• The STEM Crisis & Our Solution
• Massachusetts
• Our Supporters
• Description
• School Partners
• Vacation Programs
• Community Outreach
• Homeschool STEM Workshops
• SciSci In The Field
• Growing the Future at EPCOT®
• ACCESS Program
• Teacher Resources
• Family Resources
• Donate to Us
• Join our Team
• Volunteer Opportunities

What is a Hypothesis?

Experimental Design

Today, students learned about the importance of experimental design. Starting with the steps of the Ruler Drop Experiment which we can use to test reaction times, students came up with their own hypotheses about what variables might affect people’s reaction times. Then they came up with their own experimental plans to test these hypotheses. Students learned that it is important that a good hypothesis makes a claim about the relationship between two variables, and that this relationship is specific and testable in a measurable way. Students also learned that only one variable—the independent variable—can differ between test groups. Finally, we talked about how it is important to have more than one test subject so that an average can be taken. Ask your student to test your reaction times!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• News and Events

Latest Posts

Job applications.

[email protected]

533 Airport Blvd, Suite 135 Burlingame, CA 94010

MASSACHUSETTS

16 Tower Office Park Woburn, MA 01801

9001 E Bloomington Fwy, Suite #139 Bloomington MN 55420

FOR FAMILIES

For teachers.

Copyright © 2014 - 2022 Science From Scientists - All rights reserved.

Website by Modern Leaf Design

• Publications
• Conferences & Events
• Professional Learning
• Science Standards
• Awards & Competitions
• Instructional Materials
• Free Resources
• For Preservice Teachers
• NCCSTS Case Collection
• Science and STEM Education Jobs
• Interactive eBooks+
• Digital Catalog
• Regional Product Representatives
• e-Newsletters
• Browse All Titles
• Bestselling Books
• Latest Books
• Popular Book Series
• Submit Book Proposal
• Web Seminars
• National Conference • New Orleans 24
• Leaders Institute • New Orleans 24
• National Conference • Philadelphia 25
• Exhibits & Sponsorship
• Submit a Proposal
• Conference Reviewers
• Past Conferences
• Latest Resources
• Professional Learning Units & Courses
• For Districts
• Online Course Providers
• Schools & Districts
• College Professors & Students
• The Standards
• Teachers and Admin
• eCYBERMISSION
• Toshiba/NSTA ExploraVision
• Junior Science & Humanities Symposium
• Teaching Awards
• Climate Change
• Earth & Space Science
• New Science Teachers
• Early Childhood
• Middle School
• High School
• Postsecondary
• Informal Education
• Journal Articles
• Lesson Plans
• e-newsletters
• Science & Children
• Science Scope
• The Science Teacher
• Journal of College Sci. Teaching
• Connected Science Learning
• NSTA Reports
• Next-Gen Navigator
• Science Update
• Teacher Tip Tuesday
• Trans. Sci. Learning

MyNSTA Community

• My Collections

Formative Assessment Probe

What Is a Hypothesis?

By Page Keeley

Uncovering Student Ideas in Science, Volume 3: Another 25 Formative Assessment Probes

Share Discuss

This is the new updated edition of the first book in the bestselling  Uncovering Student Ideas in Science  series. Like the first edition of volume 1, this book helps pinpoint what your students know (or think they know) so you can monitor their learning and adjust your teaching accordingly. Loaded with classroom-friendly features you can use immediately, the book includes 25 “probes”—brief, easily administered formative assessments designed to understand your students’ thinking about 60 core science concepts.

Access this probe as a Google form:  English

Download this probe as an editable PDF: English

The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about hypotheses. The probe is designed to find out if students understand what a hypothesis is, when it is used, and how it is developed.

Type of Probe

Justified List

Related Concepts

hypothesis, nature of science, scientific inquiry, scientific method

Explanation

The best choices are A, B, G, K, L, and M. However, other possible answers open up discussions to contrast with the provided definition. A hypothesis is a tentative explanation that can be tested and is based on observation and/or scientific knowledge such as that that has been gained from doing background research. Hypotheses are used to investigate a scientific question. Hypotheses can be tested through experimentation or further observation, but contrary to how some students are taught to use the “scientific method,” hypotheses are not proved true or correct. Students will often state their conclusions as “My hypothesis is correct because my data prove…,” thereby equating positive results with proof (McLaughlin 2006, p. 61). In essence, experimentation as well as other means of scientific investigation never prove a hypothesis—the hypothesis gains credibility from the evidence obtained from data that support it. Data either support or negate a hypothesis but never prove something to be 100% true or correct.

Hypotheses are often confused with questions. A hypothesis is not framed as a question but rather provides a tentative explanation in response to the scientific question that leads the investigation. Sometimes the word hypothesis is oversimplified by being defined as “an educated guess.” This terminology fails to convey the explanatory or predictive nature of scientific hypotheses and omits what is most important about hypotheses: their purpose. Hypotheses are developed to explain observations, such as notable patterns in nature; predict the outcome of an experiment based on observations or prior scientific knowledge; and guide the investigator in seeking and paying attention to the right data. Calling a hypothesis a “guess” undermines the explanation that underscores a hypothesis.

Predictions and hypotheses are not the same. A hypothesis, which is a tentative explanation, can lead to a prediction. Predictions forecast the outcome of an experiment but do not include an explanation. Predictions often use if-then statements, just as hypotheses do, but this does not make a prediction a hypothesis. For example, a prediction might take the form of, “If I do [X], then [Y] will happen.” The prediction describes the outcome but it does not provide an explanation of why that outcome might result or describe any relationship between variables.

Sometimes the words hypothesis , theory , and law are inaccurately portrayed in science textbooks as a hierarchy of scientific knowledge, with the hypothesis being the first step on the way to becoming a theory and then a law. These concepts do not form a sequence for the development of scientific knowledge because each represents a different type of knowledge.

Not every investigation requires a hypothesis. Some types of investigations do not lend themselves to hypothesis testing through experimentation. A good deal of science is observational and descriptive—the study of biodiversity, for example, usually involves looking at a wide variety of specimens and maybe sketching and recording their unique characteristics. A biologist studying biodiversity might wonder, “What types of birds are found on island X?” The biologist would observe sightings of birds and perhaps sketch them and record their bird calls but would not be guided by a specific hypothesis. Many of the great discoveries in science did not begin with a hypothesis in mind. For example, Charles Darwin did not begin his observations of species in the Galapagos with a hypothesis in mind.

Contrary to the way hypotheses are often stated by students as an unimaginative response to a question posed at the beginning of an experiment, particularly those of the “cookbook” type, the generation of hypotheses by scientists is actually a creative and imaginative process, combined with the logic of scientific thought. “The process of formulating and testing hypotheses is one of the core activities of scientists. To be useful, a hypothesis should suggest what evidence would support it and what evidence would refute it. A hypothesis that cannot in principle be put to the test of evidence may be interesting, but it is not likely to be scientifically useful” (AAAS 1988, p. 5).

Curricular and Instructional Considerations

Elementary Students

In the elementary school grades, students typically engage in inquiry to begin to construct an understanding of the natural world. Their inquiries are initiated by a question. If students have a great deal of knowledge or have made prior observations, they might propose a hypothesis; in most cases, however, their knowledge and observations are too incomplete for them to hypothesize. If elementary school students are required to develop a hypothesis, it is often just a guess, which does little to contribute to an understanding of the purpose of a hypothesis. At this grade level, it is usually sufficient for students to focus on their questions, instead of hypotheses (Pine 1999).

Middle School Students

At the middle school level, students develop an understanding of what a hypothesis is and when one is used. The notion of a testable hypothesis through experimentation that involves variables is introduced and practiced at this grade level. However, there is a danger that students will think every investigation must include a hypothesis. Hypothesizing as a skill is important to develop at this grade level but it is also important to develop the understandings of what a hypothesis is and why and how it is developed.

High School Students

At this level, students have acquired more scientific knowledge and experiences and so are able to propose tentative explanations. They can formulate a testable hypothesis and demonstrate the logical connections between the scientific concepts guiding a hypothesis and the design of an experiment (NRC 1996).

Administering the Probe

This probe is best used as is at the middle school and high school levels, particularly if students have been previously exposed to the word hypothesis or its use. Remove any answer choices students might not be familiar with. For example, if they have not encountered if-then reasoning, eliminate this distracter. The probe can also be modified as a simpler version for students in grades 3–5 by leaving out some of the choices and simplifying the descriptions.

K–4 Understandings About Scientific Inquiry

• Scientific investigations involve asking and answering a question and comparing the answer with what scientists already know about the world.
• Scientists develop explanations using observations (evidence) and what they already know about the world (scientific knowledge).

5–8 Understandings About Scientific Inquiry

• Different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of investigations. Some investigations involve observing and describing objects, organisms, or events; some involve collecting specimens; some involve experiments; some involve seeking more information; some involve discovery of new objects and phenomena; and some involve making models.
• Current scientific knowledge and understanding guide scientific investigations. Different scientific domains employ different methods, core theories, and standards to advance scientific knowledge and understanding.

5–8 Science as a Human Endeavor

• Science is very much a human endeavor, and the work of science relies on basic human qualities such as reasoning, insight, energy, skill, and creativity.

9–12 Abilities Necessary to Do Scientific Inquiry

• Identify questions and concepts that guide scientific investigations.*

9–12 Understandings About Scientific Inquiry

• Scientists usually inquire about how physical, living, or designed systems function. Conceptual principles and knowledge guide scientific inquiries. Historical and current scientific knowledge influence the design and interpretation of investigations and the evaluation of proposed explanations made by other scientists.

*Indicates a strong match between the ideas elicited by the probe and a national standard’s learning goal.

K–2 Scientific Inquiry

• People can often learn about things around them by just observing those things carefully, but sometimes they can learn more by doing something to the things and noting what happens.

3–5 Scientific Inquiry

• Scientists’ explanations about what happens in the world come partly from what they observe and partly from what they think. Sometimes scientists have different explanations for the same set of observations. That usually leads to their making more observations to resolve the differences.

6–8 Scientific Inquiry

• Scientists differ greatly in what phenomena they study and how they go about their work. Although there is no fixed set of steps that all scientists follow, scientific investigations usually involve the collection of relevant evidence, the use of logical reasoning, and the application of imagination in devising hypotheses and explanations to make sense of the collected evidence.*

6–8 Values and Attitudes

• Even if they turn out not to be true, hypotheses are valuable if they lead to fruitful investigations.*

9–12 Scientific Inquiry

• Hypotheses are widely used in science for choosing what data to pay attention to and what additional data to seek and for guiding the interpretation of the data (both new and previously available).*

Related Research

• Students generally have difficulty with explaining how science is conducted because they have had little contact with real scientists. Their familiarity with doing science, even at older ages, is “school science,” which is often not how science is generally conducted in the scientific community (Driver et al. 1996).
• Despite over 10 years of reform efforts in science education, research still shows that students typically have inadequate conceptions of what science is and what scientists do (Schwartz 2007).
• Upper elementary school and middle school students may not understand experimentation as a method of testing ideas, but rather as a method of trying things out or producing a desired outcome (AAAS 1993).
• Middle school students tend to invoke personal experiences as evidence to justify their hypothesis. They seem to think of evidence as selected from what is already known or from personal experience or secondhand sources, not as information produced through experiment (AAAS 1993).

Related NSTA Resources

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 1993. Benchmarks for science literacy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Keeley, P. 2005. Science curriculum topic study: Bridging the gap between standards and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

McLaughlin, J. 2006. A gentle reminder that a hypothesis is never proven correct, nor is a theory ever proven true. Journal of College Science Teaching 36 (1): 60–62.

National Research Council (NRC). 1996. National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Schwartz, R. 2007. What’s in a word? How word choice can develop (mis)conceptions about the nature of science. Science Scope 31 (2): 42–47.

VanDorn, K., M. Mavita, L. Montes, B. Ackerson, and M. Rockley. 2004. Hypothesis-based learning. Science Scope 27: 24–25.

Suggestions for Instruction and Assessment

• The “scientific method” is often the first topic students encounter when using textbooks and this can erroneously imply that there is a rigid set of steps that all scientists follow, including the development of a hypothesis. Often the scientific method described in textbooks applies to experimentation, which is only one of many ways scientists conduct their work. Embedding explicit instruction of the various ways to do science in the actual investigations students do throughout the year as well as in their studies of investigations done by scientists is a better approach to understanding how science is done than starting off the year with the scientific method in a way that is devoid of a context through which students can learn the content and process of science.
• Students often participate in science fairs that may follow a textbook scientific method of posing a question, developing a hypothesis, and so on, that incorrectly results in students “proving” their hypothesis. Make sure students understand that a hypothesis can be disproven, but it is never proven, which implies 100% certainty.
• Help students understand that science begins with a question. The structure of some school lab reports may lead students to believe that all investigations begin with a hypothesis. While some investigations do begin with a hypothesis, in most cases, they begin with a question. Sometimes it is just a general question.
• A technique to help students maintain a consistent image of science as inquiry throughout the year by paying more careful attention to the words they use is to create a “caution words” poster or bulletin board (Schwartz 2007). Important words that have specific meanings in science but are often used inappropriately in the science classroom and through everyday language can be posted in the room as a reminder to pay careful attention to how students are using these words. For example, words like hypothesis and scientific method can be posted here. Words that are banned when referring to hypotheses include prove, correct, and true.
• Use caution when asking students to write lab reports that use the same format regardless of the type of investigation conducted. The format used in writing about an investigation may imply a rigid, fixed process or erroneously misrepresent aspects of science, such as that hypotheses are developed for every scientific investigation.
• Avoid using hypotheses with younger children when they result in guesses. It is better to start with a question and have students make a prediction about what they think will happen and why. As they acquire more conceptual understanding and experience a variety of observations, they will be better prepared to develop hypotheses that reflect the way science is done.
• Avoid using “educated guess” as a description for hypothesis. The common meaning of the word guess implies no prior knowledge, experience, or observations.
• Scaffold hypothesis writing for students by initially having them use words like may in their statements and then formalizing them with if-then statements. For example, students may start with the statement, “The growth of algae may be affected by temperature.” The next step would be to extend this statement to include a testable relationship, such as, “If the temperature of the water increases, then the algae population will increase.” Encourage students to propose a tentative explanation and then consider how they would go about testing the statement.

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 1988. Science for all Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.

Driver, R., J. Leach, R. Millar, and P. Scott. 1996. Young people’s images of science. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Pine, J. 1999. To hypothesize or not to hypothesize. In Foundations: A monograph for professionals in science, mathematics, and technology education. Vol. 2. Inquiry: Thoughts, views, and strategies for the K–5 classroom. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation.

You may also like

Reports Article

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Sweepstakes
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

How to Write a Great Hypothesis

Hypothesis Definition, Format, Examples, and Tips

Verywell / Alex Dos Diaz

• The Scientific Method

Hypothesis Format

Falsifiability of a hypothesis.

• Operationalization

Hypothesis Types

Hypotheses examples.

• Collecting Data

A hypothesis is a tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables. It is a specific, testable prediction about what you expect to happen in a study. It is a preliminary answer to your question that helps guide the research process.

Consider a study designed to examine the relationship between sleep deprivation and test performance. The hypothesis might be: "This study is designed to assess the hypothesis that sleep-deprived people will perform worse on a test than individuals who are not sleep-deprived."

At a Glance

A hypothesis is crucial to scientific research because it offers a clear direction for what the researchers are looking to find. This allows them to design experiments to test their predictions and add to our scientific knowledge about the world. This article explores how a hypothesis is used in psychology research, how to write a good hypothesis, and the different types of hypotheses you might use.

The Hypothesis in the Scientific Method

In the scientific method , whether it involves research in psychology, biology, or some other area, a hypothesis represents what the researchers think will happen in an experiment. The scientific method involves the following steps:

• Forming a question
• Performing background research
• Creating a hypothesis
• Designing an experiment
• Collecting data
• Analyzing the results
• Drawing conclusions
• Communicating the results

The hypothesis is a prediction, but it involves more than a guess. Most of the time, the hypothesis begins with a question which is then explored through background research. At this point, researchers then begin to develop a testable hypothesis.

Unless you are creating an exploratory study, your hypothesis should always explain what you  expect  to happen.

In a study exploring the effects of a particular drug, the hypothesis might be that researchers expect the drug to have some type of effect on the symptoms of a specific illness. In psychology, the hypothesis might focus on how a certain aspect of the environment might influence a particular behavior.

Remember, a hypothesis does not have to be correct. While the hypothesis predicts what the researchers expect to see, the goal of the research is to determine whether this guess is right or wrong. When conducting an experiment, researchers might explore numerous factors to determine which ones might contribute to the ultimate outcome.

In many cases, researchers may find that the results of an experiment  do not  support the original hypothesis. When writing up these results, the researchers might suggest other options that should be explored in future studies.

In many cases, researchers might draw a hypothesis from a specific theory or build on previous research. For example, prior research has shown that stress can impact the immune system. So a researcher might hypothesize: "People with high-stress levels will be more likely to contract a common cold after being exposed to the virus than people who have low-stress levels."

In other instances, researchers might look at commonly held beliefs or folk wisdom. "Birds of a feather flock together" is one example of folk adage that a psychologist might try to investigate. The researcher might pose a specific hypothesis that "People tend to select romantic partners who are similar to them in interests and educational level."

Elements of a Good Hypothesis

So how do you write a good hypothesis? When trying to come up with a hypothesis for your research or experiments, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your hypothesis based on your research on a topic?
• Can your hypothesis be tested?
• Does your hypothesis include independent and dependent variables?

Before you come up with a specific hypothesis, spend some time doing background research. Once you have completed a literature review, start thinking about potential questions you still have. Pay attention to the discussion section in the  journal articles you read . Many authors will suggest questions that still need to be explored.

How to Formulate a Good Hypothesis

To form a hypothesis, you should take these steps:

• Collect as many observations about a topic or problem as you can.
• Evaluate these observations and look for possible causes of the problem.
• Create a list of possible explanations that you might want to explore.
• After you have developed some possible hypotheses, think of ways that you could confirm or disprove each hypothesis through experimentation. This is known as falsifiability.

In the scientific method ,  falsifiability is an important part of any valid hypothesis. In order to test a claim scientifically, it must be possible that the claim could be proven false.

Students sometimes confuse the idea of falsifiability with the idea that it means that something is false, which is not the case. What falsifiability means is that  if  something was false, then it is possible to demonstrate that it is false.

One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is that it makes claims that cannot be refuted or proven false.

The Importance of Operational Definitions

A variable is a factor or element that can be changed and manipulated in ways that are observable and measurable. However, the researcher must also define how the variable will be manipulated and measured in the study.

Operational definitions are specific definitions for all relevant factors in a study. This process helps make vague or ambiguous concepts detailed and measurable.

For example, a researcher might operationally define the variable " test anxiety " as the results of a self-report measure of anxiety experienced during an exam. A "study habits" variable might be defined by the amount of studying that actually occurs as measured by time.

These precise descriptions are important because many things can be measured in various ways. Clearly defining these variables and how they are measured helps ensure that other researchers can replicate your results.

Replicability

One of the basic principles of any type of scientific research is that the results must be replicable.

Replication means repeating an experiment in the same way to produce the same results. By clearly detailing the specifics of how the variables were measured and manipulated, other researchers can better understand the results and repeat the study if needed.

Some variables are more difficult than others to define. For example, how would you operationally define a variable such as aggression ? For obvious ethical reasons, researchers cannot create a situation in which a person behaves aggressively toward others.

To measure this variable, the researcher must devise a measurement that assesses aggressive behavior without harming others. The researcher might utilize a simulated task to measure aggressiveness in this situation.

Hypothesis Checklist

• Does your hypothesis focus on something that you can actually test?
• Does your hypothesis include both an independent and dependent variable?
• Can you manipulate the variables?
• Can your hypothesis be tested without violating ethical standards?

The hypothesis you use will depend on what you are investigating and hoping to find. Some of the main types of hypotheses that you might use include:

• Simple hypothesis : This type of hypothesis suggests there is a relationship between one independent variable and one dependent variable.
• Complex hypothesis : This type suggests a relationship between three or more variables, such as two independent and dependent variables.
• Null hypothesis : This hypothesis suggests no relationship exists between two or more variables.
• Alternative hypothesis : This hypothesis states the opposite of the null hypothesis.
• Statistical hypothesis : This hypothesis uses statistical analysis to evaluate a representative population sample and then generalizes the findings to the larger group.
• Logical hypothesis : This hypothesis assumes a relationship between variables without collecting data or evidence.

A hypothesis often follows a basic format of "If {this happens} then {this will happen}." One way to structure your hypothesis is to describe what will happen to the  dependent variable  if you change the  independent variable .

The basic format might be: "If {these changes are made to a certain independent variable}, then we will observe {a change in a specific dependent variable}."

A few examples of simple hypotheses:

• "Students who eat breakfast will perform better on a math exam than students who do not eat breakfast."
• "Students who experience test anxiety before an English exam will get lower scores than students who do not experience test anxiety."​
• "Motorists who talk on the phone while driving will be more likely to make errors on a driving course than those who do not talk on the phone."
• "Children who receive a new reading intervention will have higher reading scores than students who do not receive the intervention."

Examples of a complex hypothesis include:

• "People with high-sugar diets and sedentary activity levels are more likely to develop depression."
• "Younger people who are regularly exposed to green, outdoor areas have better subjective well-being than older adults who have limited exposure to green spaces."

Examples of a null hypothesis include:

• "There is no difference in anxiety levels between people who take St. John's wort supplements and those who do not."
• "There is no difference in scores on a memory recall task between children and adults."
• "There is no difference in aggression levels between children who play first-person shooter games and those who do not."

Examples of an alternative hypothesis:

• "People who take St. John's wort supplements will have less anxiety than those who do not."
• "Adults will perform better on a memory task than children."
• "Children who play first-person shooter games will show higher levels of aggression than children who do not." 

Collecting Data on Your Hypothesis

Once a researcher has formed a testable hypothesis, the next step is to select a research design and start collecting data. The research method depends largely on exactly what they are studying. There are two basic types of research methods: descriptive research and experimental research.

Descriptive Research Methods

Descriptive research such as  case studies ,  naturalistic observations , and surveys are often used when  conducting an experiment is difficult or impossible. These methods are best used to describe different aspects of a behavior or psychological phenomenon.

Once a researcher has collected data using descriptive methods, a  correlational study  can examine how the variables are related. This research method might be used to investigate a hypothesis that is difficult to test experimentally.

Experimental Research Methods

Experimental methods  are used to demonstrate causal relationships between variables. In an experiment, the researcher systematically manipulates a variable of interest (known as the independent variable) and measures the effect on another variable (known as the dependent variable).

Unlike correlational studies, which can only be used to determine if there is a relationship between two variables, experimental methods can be used to determine the actual nature of the relationship—whether changes in one variable actually  cause  another to change.

The hypothesis is a critical part of any scientific exploration. It represents what researchers expect to find in a study or experiment. In situations where the hypothesis is unsupported by the research, the research still has value. Such research helps us better understand how different aspects of the natural world relate to one another. It also helps us develop new hypotheses that can then be tested in the future.

Thompson WH, Skau S. On the scope of scientific hypotheses .  R Soc Open Sci . 2023;10(8):230607. doi:10.1098/rsos.230607

Taran S, Adhikari NKJ, Fan E. Falsifiability in medicine: what clinicians can learn from Karl Popper [published correction appears in Intensive Care Med. 2021 Jun 17;:].  Intensive Care Med . 2021;47(9):1054-1056. doi:10.1007/s00134-021-06432-z

Eyler AA. Research Methods for Public Health . 1st ed. Springer Publishing Company; 2020. doi:10.1891/9780826182067.0004

Nosek BA, Errington TM. What is replication ?  PLoS Biol . 2020;18(3):e3000691. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000691

Aggarwal R, Ranganathan P. Study designs: Part 2 - Descriptive studies .  Perspect Clin Res . 2019;10(1):34-36. doi:10.4103/picr.PICR_154_18

Nevid J. Psychology: Concepts and Applications. Wadworth, 2013.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Why Some Children Are Orchids and Others Are Dandelions

Many children are able to thrive in any environment, while others may flourish only under the most favorable conditions. new findings reveal the complex interplay of factors that creates "dandelion" and "orchid" kids..

By W. Thomas Boyce M.D. published January 2, 2019 - last reviewed on April 11, 2019

One of the first skills taught to pediatricians and obstetricians is how to assess the physiological condition of a baby in the first few minutes after birth. As a novice physician, this was one of my favorite and most treasured duties—to be the first living soul to survey the condition of a never-before-seen human being, delivered red, squealing, and literally wet behind the ears at the end of a prolonged, critical, and one-way passage.

The formal assessment is done using the Apgar score, named for its inventor, Virginia Apgar, at one and five minutes following birth. Scores range from 0 to 10, the sum of a 0, 1, or 2 assessed in each of five areas of postnatal functioning, arranged into the acronym APGAR: Appearance (the pink or blue color of the body, hands, and feet); Pulse rate; Grimace (the crying or grimacing response to nasal or oral suction, or other stimulation); Activity (the degree and vigor of muscle flexion); and Respiration. Most babies receive scores ranging from 7 to 10. Those with scores below 7 may need more active and rapid stimulation or resuscitation, including a heated bassinet or a suctioning of the airway. For scores less than 4, we might insert a breathing tube to support respiration or even begin external heart compressions.

HOW DO KIDS COPE? To get a sense of how school-age children think about resilience , PT asked a few how they cheer up others or whether they have a go-to strategy for themselves. Their portraits follow.

Orchids and Dandelions

As a pediatrician for more than four decades, I have become vividly aware of the great unevenness—the disproportion—evident in the differences in health and development among individual children from the first moments of life. Even within single families, parents often tell me that all of their children were basically healthy, "except for Sarah," or Julio, or Jamal. Pediatricians implicitly understand, from simple, day-to-day observation, that some children are inordinately affected by the forces that protect health and those that imperil it. And at the level of the community, we know that, within any given population of children, a small minority—about 20 percent of individuals—will suffer the majority of all illnesses and disorders.

Developmental science has convincingly shown that one of the origins of such differences is children's early experiences of psychological trauma and adversity. Such experience can impede normal brain development, create obstacles to effective learning, and impair mental and physical health during childhood and over the remaining life course. This is why children growing up in poverty, children who are mistreated by their parents or others, and children exposed to violence within the family or community are all at risk for compromised development, educational achievement, and mental or physical health.

But all children are not equally susceptible to these effects. While some are powerfully affected by trauma, others are able to effectively weather adverse experiences, sustaining few, if any, developmental or health consequences. People tend to view these differences in susceptibility as attributable to an inherent vulnerability or resilience, imagining that some small number of resilient or "unbreakable" children have a special capacity to thrive, even in the face of severe adversity. Our research suggests instead that such variance is attributable not to innate traits but to differences in children's relative biological susceptibility to the social contexts in which they live and grow, both the negative and the positive.

A majority of children show a kind of biological indifference to experiences of adversity, with stress response circuits in their brains that are minimally reactive to such events. Like dandelions that thrive in almost any environment, such children are mostly unperturbed by the stressors and traumas they confront. We think of them, metaphorically, as dandelion children. A minority of children—about one in five—show an exceptional susceptibility to both negative and positive social contexts, with stress response circuits highly sensitive to adverse events. Like orchids, which require very particular, supportive environments to thrive, these children show an exceptional capacity for succeeding in nurturant, supportive circumstances, but sustain disproportionate numbers of illnesses and problems when raised in stressful , adverse social conditions. We think of these as orchid children.

Developmental science is increasingly revealing that the relative indifference of dandelion children and the special sensitivity of orchid children to the character of their early environment are likely attributable to the joint effects of genes and social contexts. These epigenetic processes—in which environmental cues regulate the expression of genetic differences—are the likely regulators of children's differential susceptibility to environmental influences. Recognizing this differential susceptibility is an essential key to understanding the experiences of individual children, to parenting children of differing sensitivities and temperaments effectively, and to fostering the healthy, adaptive capacity of all young people.

Origins of the Types

So, are orchids born that way, or do they become orchids by way of early life experience? Our first hint at an answer came from the very first moments of postnatal life.

What is especially interesting about the Apgar score is the degree to which the things it measures are controlled by the fight-or-flight autonomic nervous system involved in dealing with stress. Each subscore is an indicator of the body's adaptation to the considerable physical (and possibly emotional) stressors of being born; low scores are a reflection of insufficiently adaptive responses. After all, birth is an extreme and unprecedented experience, and it is such experiences that tell us most about who we are as extensions of our individual biology.

Given that we all begin life by being plunged into an epic stress reactivity experiment, might we not wonder whether the Apgar score could tell us more than just whether we need to have our mouths suctioned or our bodies warmed? If lower scores were reflective of less adaptive, less compensatory fight-or-flight responses, might they also be telling us about a baby's longer-term proclivity toward maladaptive responses to stress? Could our first extrauterine moments augur something important about our whole life yet to come?

That is exactly what we have found. Careful epidemiologic work by one of my doctoral students and a former postdoctoral fellow has found that in nearly 34,000 children from Manitoba, Canada, five-minute Apgar scores were predictive of teacher-reported developmental vulnerability at age 5 for a variety of developmental dimensions. For example, the teachers of children who had Apgar scores of 7 identified more areas of developmental vulnerability than they did for children with Apgar scores of 9 or 10, and kindergartners who had Apgar scores of 3 or 4 had more reported developmental vulnerabilities than did peers with scores of 6 or 7. (The teachers had no prior knowledge of their students' Apgar scores.) The vulnerabilities that teachers reported might have included lower competence in following rules or instructions; an inability to sit still and focus; a relative lack of interest in books and reading; or an inability to properly grasp and use a pencil. At each lower step on the Apgar scale, such physical, social, emotional, language, and communication domains of development were all significantly more compromised five years later. Babies entering the world with greater fight-or-flight instability and less capacity for physiological recovery were more developmentally vulnerable.

Nature vs. Nurture

One source of such variation in adaptive stability is surely genetic difference among infants, but genes alone do not make a child an orchid or a dandelion. As work by other researchers has shown, the genetic characteristics of children create their predispositions, but do not necessarily determine their outcomes.

For example, a consortium studying Romanian children raised in horribly negligent, sometimes cruel orphanages under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, before his fall in 1989, discovered that a shorter version of a gene related to the neurotransmitter serotonin produced orchid-like outcomes. Children with this shorter allele (an alternative form of a gene) who remained in the orphanages developed intellectual impairments and extreme maladjustment, while those with the same allele who were adopted into foster families recovered remarkably, in terms of both development and mental health.

Similarly, a team of Dutch researchers studying experimental patterns of children's financial donations—in response to an emotionally evocative UNICEF video—found that participants with an orchid-like dopamine neurotransmitter gene gave either the most charitable contributions or the least, depending upon whether they were rated securely or insecurely attached to their parents—that is, depending on factors that were not genetic.

We used to think that any trait or feature present at birth was "congenital" and therefore determined by genes or, in ancient terms, fated in the stars. A somewhat more contemporary version of this vision is known as genetic determinism, according to which all of our differences are firmly situated at conception in the merged DNA we inherit from our parents. We can think of this view as the "nature" side of the classic debate of nature versus nurture .

The Human Genome Project—the ultimate "nature" approach—promised to uncover the "genes for" autism , schizophrenia, heart disease, and cancer. But no such unitary genes or even sets of genes have been elucidated. It is now clear that who we become is not determined by a straightforward, one-to-one route from genes to behavior, or DNA to phenotype—the set of observable characteristics, such as eye color, personality , and behavior, that describe an individual. Our most vaunted, prized, and carefully articulated hypotheses pale in the face of the exquisite complexities of the natural world.

There's an old pediatric adage that all parents-to-be are environmental determinists until they have a baby in hand, at which point they become genetic determinists. Here is what I mean: Before we have kids, we're prone to seeing the misbehavior of a child as the product of flawed parenting. That kid throwing a tantrum at the table next to us in a restaurant? It's obviously the parents' fault for not controlling him—their nurture hasn't accomplished what it needed to do. Once we're responsible for our own felon-in-training, throwing the tantrum in the adjacent airplane seat, we hope that those around us understand that we've done our best, but the child came into the world with this temperament. It's far more comforting to ascribe the behavior of our own noisy or troubling toddler to genes, for which we have only passive responsibility, than to our capacities as parents, for which we are more directly accountable.

In his book Either/Or , Søren Kierkegaard proposed that to fully understand the human condition, we need to dispense with the tendency to perceive the forces that form us as clear-cut dichotomies. Such binary views run counter to the complexities of our true character. Developmental science has in recent decades faced an "either/or" divide: The environmental view has demanded an allegiance to external causes, located within our social and physical contexts, and the genetic view has asserted that internal causes are preeminent, with genomes driving our phenotypes and lives. The positions have emerged as contradictory answers to the fundamental questions, "Why do some get sick and others do not?" and "Why are some so healthy and fulfilled while others are not?" We now know that it is almost never a matter of either/or, but rather both/and.

Unpuzzling Human Disposition

Every human disposition and disorder of mental or physical health depends on an intricate interaction between internal and external causes to take root and advance. The key to understanding human difference and to abating and preventing morbidity will involve a keener knowledge of how genetic difference and environmental variation work together to change biological processes. This approach to "unpuzzling" human nature and wellness brings us closer to understanding what makes orchids and dandelions bloom, wither, or move between these states over the course of a changing life. Both genes and social environments are almost certainly influential for both orchid and dandelion phenotypes, but it is likely the interaction of genes and environments that determine where the kids in my studies ended up on the graphs that we created to chart their behavior and health.

Human infants, even prior to birth, are remarkably and finely attuned to the dynamic features of their environment, first in the womb and later in the nest with which their parents surround them. The brain of the human fetus and newborn is a "black hole" of sensory capacity that can respond to its environment even before consciousness registers it. A newborn unconsciously adapts in the service of "early life programming," as biological adjustments begin, without awareness, as soon as the brain begins to detect challenges. This early programming enhances the likelihood of short-term survival—at least until the capacity for reproducing comes online in puberty , but it may also have the downside of generating greater risks of chronic adult conditions, such as coronary heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and mental disorders. It is an evolutionary strategy of trading survival in the short run for diminished and less vigorous longevity.

We think that differential susceptibilities to the environment —and thus orchid and dandelion children—emerge in this way. In certain kinds of early social and physical contexts, important benefits to survival and thriving might accrue for children with special, enhanced sensitivities. Children reared in environments of continuous threat and predation, for example, might logically be protected by the vigilance and hawk-eyed attentiveness of orchid sensibilities. Millennia ago, having a few orchidish individuals within a hominid band might have been protective of the group, as attacks from animals and other groups arose. On the other hand, being an orchid might also be of great benefit to those living at the other extreme—in environments of exceptional safety, protection, and abundance. Here, the propensity of orchid children to be open and porous to environmental events and exposures would garner even greater advantages. Most children would thrive in such settings. Orchids would thrive spectacularly.

Outside of these most extreme conditions, however, being a dandelion must surely yield the greatest rewards at the smallest price. Dandelions seem impervious to all but the most virulent of threats and insults. Within the typical ups and downs of human societies, these are the individuals deemed resilient, hardy, and buoyant. Evolution should thus tend to favor a proliferation of orchid phenotypes at the extremes of environmental conditions, while dandelion phenotypes should predominate within the broad middle range of challenges. Sure enough, there is at least preliminary evidence that dandelions are disproportionately represented in settings where neither menaces nor great fortune predominate.

Marking Our Genes

During a formative, seven-year sojourn in the frigid green wilds of Canada, at the University of British Columbia, I had the good fortune to meet Mike Kobor and Marla Sokolowski. Mike studies the molecular biology of the yeast genome, and Marla is a fly geneticist who discovered the foraging gene (known as for ) in fruit flies and is responsible for the work defining two major behavioral phenotypes in flies (and other species)—"rovers" and "sitters"— determined by DNA sequence differences in that gene.

Mike and Marla share a capacity for broadly envisioning the implications of discoveries in basic animal models for human societies: They discern our civilizations in our genes. We converged under the sponsorship of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), forming the Child and Brain Development Program, which Marla and I now co-lead. Our program quickly closed in on the captivating question of how genes and environments, especially environments of adversity and inequality, together produce known individual differences in susceptibility, behavior, health, and disease. The answer has proven key to a provisional understanding of where orchids and dandelions come from.

We have established that genetic variation—differences in the DNA code that makes up individual genes—plays a role in the genesis of orchid and dandelion children. Although many genes likely contribute to the phenotypes, those involved in brain development and function are almost certainly implicated. The expression of genes involved in emotion regulation and behavioral control, for example— features that are highly salient in orchids and dandelions—govern neurotransmitter communications among individual neurons.

But early environmental experiences undoubtedly play an additional role, especially exposure to adversity and threat and experiences of family or community support and nurture. Emerging science suggests that genes and environments contribute to the emergence of orchids and dandelions, additively and interactively, but until recently we had no real idea of how this interaction actually took place. The field that has now flooded this enigmatic landscape with new light is epigenetics , the science of how environmental exposures can modify gene expression without altering the DNA sequence of the gene itself. The Greek prefix epi—meaning "upon" or "above"—connotes how the epigenome, a lattice of chemical "marks" or tags, literally lies upon the genome and controls the expression or silencing of DNA.

Every type of cell we possess—blood, liver, lung, skin, brain—contains precisely the same genome, the same collection of genes with the same DNA sequences, half from our mothers and half from our fathers. The only way that the 200 or so different human cell types, each with a different structure and different functions, could be made from a single genome is if the functioning of our 25,000 genes could be independently controlled. That's how the epigenome comes into play in embryonic development. Stem cells can become kidney cells or white blood cells only through the programmed, epigenetic regulation of those thousands of genes. Once a stem cell is differentiated—say, into a white blood cell—the functioning of that cell can also be adjusted (again, epigenetically) to accommodate or adapt to the conditions with which the cell or the whole organism is contending. For example, a child facing a seriously stressful environment might need to change white blood cells' rate of division (increasing the number of available immune cells), the cells' responsiveness to stress hormones (sensitizing them to the effects of cortisol), or their production of the molecules initiating and governing inflammation (such as the chemical messengers called cytokines).

So, the epigenome has two major functions: It regulates the differentiation of cells into their various types and tissues, and it facilitates an adjustment of cell function to respond to the conditions at hand. It does both of these by regulating the epigenetic chemical tags that attach to the genome, turning up or turning down the expression of the thousands of genes in each cell. It is a great and agile improviser.

Pianos and Equalizers

Think of the genome and epigenome like this: Your genes are the keys on a piano; each plays a distinctive note. But while a piano has just 88 white and black keys, your genome houses around 25,000 individual genes, making it thousands of times more complex. In the first kind of epigenetic regulation—cell differentiation—these keys can be played in different combinations, sequences, and timings to create a whole variety of different tunes—200 different ones, for each of the different types of cells in a human body. One corresponds to the production of neurons, another to white blood cells, yet another to skin cells, and so on.

Once cells are differentiated on this magnificent piano, the epigenome is then used for a second kind of process: the adjustment of cell function to the conditions the organism is encountering. Here, the epigenome serves as an "equalizer" that adjusts each cell's functions, changing the way its tune sounds, like the levers on an audio equalizer adjusting the balance between sound frequency ranges to emphasize treble or bass notes. Although each type of cell always plays the same tune—a white blood cell will stay a white blood cell—the way that the cell functions can be adaptively adjusted to suit specific circumstances.

For example, the body of a child encountering a major early life stressor, like maltreatment, might automatically adjust the functioning of many different cell types in order to adapt as well as possible to the experience. Adrenal gland cells might be called upon to produce more cortisol; nerve cells could activate the fight-or-flight system; white blood cells could respond to any physical injuries; and brain cells might dampen the child's emotional response. And these would be only four adjustments among probably hundreds occurring at the same time.

Just as biobehavioral phenotypes, like orchid and dandelion children, are likely influenced by DNA sequence variations in many genes, it is probably also true that the effects of early experience on these phenotypes involve many epigenetic changes within multiple genes. Just which genes are different in sequence and where the epigenetic marks occur is still being worked out, for orchid versus dandelion, introvert versus extrovert , predispositions to depression versus predilections for joy, and other human differences.

What we now know with some certainty, however, is that most variation in human character, nature, and health will eventually be attributable to an interactive combination of differences in the DNA sequences of multiple genes, along with experience-driven differences in the epigenetic marks that shape the expression, or decoding, of multiple genes. What is wickedly complex in the number of variations involved is elegantly simple in design: Genes and experience interactively affect human destiny, and the epigenome is the physical link between a gene and its environment. You can think of human life as the song that issues from the epigenetic piano and its equalizer, the result of a complex compositional process shaped by both genes and environments. Each person is predisposed to play certain types of scores, like those of the orchid or the dandelion, but there is abundant space for unique variation and improvisation.

Excerpted from THE ORCHID AND THE DANDELION: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive . Copyright © 2019 by W. Thomas Boyce, M.D. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Submit your response to this story to [email protected] . If you would like us to consider your letter for publication, please include your name, city, and state. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Pick up a copy of Psychology Today on newsstands now or subscribe to read the the rest of the latest issue.

Facebook Image: Yuliia D/Shutterstock

LinkedIn Image: Lopolo/Shutterstock

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

• / Professionals
• / Risk assessment
• / The STEPWISE Approach
• / Step One: Hypothesise

Step One: Hypothesise

The word hypothesis has its origins in ancient Greek and means ' a proposed explanation for a phenomenon' (Wikipedia - online dictionary). In modern day usage, a hypothesis is a provisional idea or explanation which has to be evaluated or tested. The idea needs to be either confirmed or disproved. The hypothesis should be 'falsifiable', which means it is possible for it to be shown to be false, usually by observation. Even if confirmed, the hypothesis is not necessarily proven, but remains provisional.

Hypothesising is a core activity within social work assessment. Holland (2004) states:

"The cornerstone of analysis in assessment work might be seen as the process of building hypotheses for understanding a family situation and developing these until they include a plan for the way forward ."

This process of building, testing out and discarding hypotheses starts at the earliest point of contact. As soon as a referral is received into a social work team the practitioner will begin consciously or unconsciously to form some hypotheses of what is happening within the family. They would certainly check out some of their hypotheses during an initial conversation with the referrer and may even ditch one or more of them at this stage. The formation of various hypotheses and the decision taken about the steps needed to investigate the matter further will be influenced by a range of factors, for example: practice wisdom, personal values, and formal knowledge.

Munro highlights the fact that " The single most important factor in minimizing errors (in child protection practice) is to admit that you may be wrong" (Munro 2008: 125).

In risk assessment Raynes in Calder and others (2003) suggests that workers often remain narrowly focused on proving or disproving whether the original risk or perception about a family remains and fail to consider the broader picture, or alternative hypotheses about what is happening and why. Practitioners should therefore consider all the possibilities about what is happening and address each hypothesis, only discarding it when there is clear evidence to do so.

Stepwise requires that this is considered as part of a structured approach and that forming, testing out and discarding hypotheses needs to be a clear and recorded part of any assessment process.

The practitioner should record the possible hypotheses to which they are working and this needs to be done in a way that shows a) it's only a hypothesis not a conclusion, and b) that it's a reasonable hypothesis based on information to hand at that time (including research info) in order to avoid any later suggestion of bias/premature judgement. Planning the nature and source of information to be collected, should enable practitioners and managers to test out all possible hypotheses in the analysis stage, to prove or disprove the likelihood of one of them being the case in this situation. This will require use of the analysis models underpinning this framework.

In essence, at this step, practitioners should be asking:  "What are we worried about? What is the possible danger or harm to the child?" If our hypotheses are correct, what needs to happen?"

Where hypotheses relate to actual or likely abuse of a child, the child protection procedures must be followed, and the assessment planned as part of a strategy discussion or meeting.

Quick links

• Discuss with the person
• Discuss with your manager
• Advice if you are unsure
• Sharing information
• Working with children and families
• Immediate action
• Strategy discussion
• Child protection investigation
• Medical examinations
• Initial child protection case conference
• Conference agenda
• Involvement of parents and carers - at conference
• Involvement of children at conference
• Core Assessment
• Looked After Children
• Missing Children
• Children Moving Away from Guernsey
• Child Death Review
• Child's Voice
• Injuries to non-mobile babies and children
• Interpreters

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Review Article
• Open access
• Published: 26 August 2024

Defining child health in the 21st century

• Ruth E. K. Stein 1  

Pediatric Research ( 2024 ) Cite this article

107 Accesses

Metrics details

The concept of child health has evolved over many decades and has gone from defining health as the absence of disease and disability to a much more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which a confluence of many factors leads to a healthy childhood and to producing the infrastructure for a healthy lifetime. We review the evolution of these ideas and endorse the definition featured in Children’s Health, the Nation’s Wealth , which states tha t child health is: “… the extent to which individual children or groups of children are able or enabled to: (a) develop and realize their potential, (b) satisfy their needs, and (c) develop the capacities that allow them to interact successfully with their biological, physical, and social environments.”

The definition of child health and the model presented form a framework for conducting and interpreting research in child health and understanding the ways in which influences affect child health.

They also demonstrate how child health is the foundation for life-long health.

Child health is dynamic and is always changing.

There are many influences affecting child health at any given time.

Because each child’s health is different, they may react in distinctive ways to a new health challenge.

Similar content being viewed by others

Improving child health through Big Data and data science

SPR perspectives: Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program: overcoming challenges to generate engaged, multidisciplinary science

SPR Perspectives: scientific opportunities in the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes Program

This model is best represented by a kaleidoscope of influences (biology, social and built environment, behavior, policies, and services) working together over a child’s life and developmental trajectory. The model has life-long implications for adult health and well-being and has far-reaching implications for promoting children’s health and for understanding research in child health. Pediatrics is a field devoted to improving the health of children, but what does that really mean? There are several aspects to this all-important question. How do we currently view and define child health? How do we understand the things that underpin a healthy childhood? What is the significance of child health for life-long health? The answers to these questions are important for all our endeavors as child-oriented clinicians and are key to our ongoing research efforts to improve child health.

Approaches to child health

The concept of child health has evolved over many decades and has gone from defining health as the absence of disease and disability to a much more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which a confluence of many factors leads to a healthy childhood and to producing the infrastructure for a healthy lifetime. While this is true in the United States and most of the upper income nations and the elite in many other communities, many low- and middle-income countries still experience high childhood morbidity and mortality and low rates of immunizations that protect children from many diseases. Thus, for many of them, the absence of disease continues to be a major marker of improvements in child health.

The recognition that health is more than the absence of disease was relatively novel when it was written into the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1945. In April 7, 1948, the WHO Charter was adopted and definition was formally recognized. It stated “Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” ( https://www.who.int/about/accountability/governance/constitution ). There were several other rather revolutionary components to the constitution, including the notion that health was a human right, a call for equity in health, and the statement that governments had a responsibility for insuring health ( https://www.who.int/about/accountability/governance/constitution ). Unfortunately, the latter two elements are still not always accepted as fundamental in the United States.

An often-overlooked component of the WHO Charter is the principle that: “Healthy development of the child is of basic importance; the ability to live harmoniously in a changing total environment is essential to such development” ( https://www.who.int/about/accountability/governance/constitution ). This last principle is the only component that mentions development, something that is fundamental to childhood and yet was not incorporated into most people’s thinking about health at the time. It should be emphasized that there was little thought to differentiating the definitions of health for children and adults.

Over the next several decades, the focus was on the elimination of diseases, something that became possible with the explosion of new biomedical understanding of the causes and mechanisms for disease and the morbidity and mortality that they caused. This was a period during which there was development of a library of antibiotics and vaccines to treat and prevent many infectious diseases. The dominance of biomedical sciences resulted in a focus primarily on aspects of physical health, with emotional, cognitive, or social well-being being relatively ignored during that period. As a result, the notion that health was more than the absence of diseases got relatively little attention and a biomedical model of health dominated most discussions, whether focused on children or adults.

The mid 1970’s saw an explosion of new thoughts about child health and the key role of child development. Major elements of this new thinking were the increasing focus on differences in the biology of children and adults and in the appreciation of the extent to which factors outside of biology influenced health, especially among young children. In terms of appreciating differences between child and adult health, there was increasing recognition of the rapidly changing nature of children’s physical and behavioral characteristics; of their inherent dependency, especially early in life, and the differences in their exposure to environmental hazards and in the way that manifest poor health. The growing awareness of their biological differences led to recognition of such variations as their relative surface area, their play which placed them in closer proximity to ground level pollutants, and a myriad of metabolic differences that pediatric research had revealed.

Additionally, there was growing data on a variety of key factors other than the child’s vulnerability to infectious disease that were coming to the fore. One was the importance of infant attachment for healthy development; another was the recognition of how environmental factors such as lead were detracting from healthy development and well-being, and a third was recognition of child abuse and neglect by Henry Kempe. 1 In addition, the implementation of Medicaid and the Children and Youth projects had brought many underserved communities into traditional medical venues, where clinicians were increasingly recognizing the impact of poverty on child health. These ideas were crystalized in Robert Haggerty’s studies of Child Health and the Community , published in 1975, 2 which examined health care in Monroe country, a microcosm of the US population and focused on many factors in the lives of children beyond their biology and exposure to infectious diseases.

In response to these trends and to the increasing recognition of non-infectious causes of disease, three new broad models were put forward, each of which made major contributions to the conceptualization of child health.

The first of these was from George Engel, a psychiatrist at the University of Rochester, who proposed a revolutionary concept, which he called the “biopsychosocial” model of child health. 3 His thesis was that biological, psychological, and social components each contributed to health and that all these factors had to be considered. 3 The notion that the body and mind were connected was not entirely new and has been cited as going back at least to Descartes, but had been neglected during the focus on biology as the primary cause of illness. Engel reintroduced the concept that the social and psychological contributions to illness and well-being needed to be considered in medical science and health care, both as causes of disease and as important in their treatment. 4 Broadening the notion of health to include factors outside of biology required consideration of how these elements interacted. Engel’s model was a Venn diagram with overlap of the three types of factors: biological, social, and psychological factors. The interaction of these elements resulted in the manifestations of illness and the elements that needed to be considered in approaching care and understanding health.

At about the same time, a second set of ideas about how these factors affected one another came from a psychologist, Arnold Sameroff, 5 who developed the notion of factors relating to health affected one another in a transactional way. He proposed that the parent, child, and environment interact in ways in which each affects the other and it is the sum of those interactions that leads to the child’s development and affects the child’s health and well-being. The notion of reciprocity and interactions of multiple factors remains key in thinking today. 5

The third idea was the ecological model developed by Uri Bronfenbrenner, also a psychologist, who proposed a series of systems that influence one another and in total affect child health and development. 6 The five components ranged from the microsystem (the child’s relationship with his or her immediate environment, school, and family) to macrosystems (culture, economy, customs, and bodies of knowledge). Each layer of the environment was visualized as a concentric circle, with the child in the middle. To a large degree it was his thinking about the broader set of factors that impact child health that has stayed with us and has helped us to think beyond the child’s immediate context when considering influences on health. Bronfenbrenner’s view of the way that environment interacted with the child’s health and development dominated for many years. 6

After these three models were proposed, there was little innovative thinking about child health for a rather long period. During the ensuing decades most people accepted that the context in which a child was growing impacted his or her mental and physical health and contributed to well-being. An increasing number of studies focused on the broader issues affecting child health and on how these issues altered the manifestations of health and the outcomes of treatment. Yet none of this thinking led to a reformulation of how to define child health.

Current definition

In 2001, at Congress’s request the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion of the United States Department of Health and Human Services funded the Board of Children, Youth, and Families (BoCYF) of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine to do a study to assess the ways that child health was monitored in the United States and to make recommendations about ways to improve its measurement. 7 This Committee on the Evaluation of Children’s Health: Measures of Risk, Protective and Promotional Factors for Assessing Child Health in the Community was charged with examining what was known about child health, the risk and protective factors and how the assessment of child health could be improved. The BoCYF convened a multidisciplinary committee to conduct the study. The first step that the committee undertook was to define child health and to do so it looked at available definitions of health. The committee noted that in general definitions of child health were not distinct from those for adult health. The WHO definition, as modified by the Ottawa Convention was the primary definition available. In the Ottawa Convention the term health was viewed as “the extent to which a group or individual can fulfil their ambitions and needs, on the one hand, and evolve with or adapt to the environment, on the other” ( https://www.who.int/teams/health-promotion/enhanced-wellbeing/first-global-conference ). It further stated that “Health is thus seen as a resource for everyday life, not as the goal of life; it is a positive concept that emphasises [sic] social and individual resources as well as physical capabilities. Thus, health promotion is not just a health issue, but goes beyond healthy lifestyles to well-being” ( https://www.who.int/teams/health-promotion/enhanced-wellbeing/first-global-conference ). This was the first time promotion of health was specifically advocated by a large number of countries. 8

In examining the Ottawa Convention definition, the committee became aware that there were no clear references to the notion of development, which is such a critical component of child health and a fundamental concept in pediatrics. This is because using the WHO and Ottawa definitions, an individual who did not develop at all after birth might be considered entirely healthy–something most people would not agree with.

Based on the special characteristics of children’s health and the prior definitions, “the committee sought a comprehensive and integrative definition and conceptualization of health that reflects the dynamic nature of childhood, is conceptually sound, is based on the best scientific evidence, and provides a basis for both measuring and improving child health.” 7 (page 32) Further, it recognized “that health and well-being are a result of interactions of many biological, psychological, social, cultural, and physical factors.” 7 (pages 32 and 33)

The committee defined child health:

“… as the extent to which individual children or groups of children are able or enabled to: (a) develop and realize their potential, (b) satisfy their needs, and (c) develop the capacities that allow them to interact successfully with their biological, physical, and social environments.” 7 (pages 32 and 33)

Several features of this definition are noteworthy. First is the continued conceptualization of health as a positive construct – more than the absence of illness or disease. Second, it incorporates the special characteristics, particularly rapid development and continuous change throughout childhood, as essential components of health. It also considers all the many influences that interact over time in different ways as children develop and change, and it acknowledges the ways children interact with their specific environments and the long-term implications of these environmental factors. This definition underscores the long reach of child health into adulthood underscoring that the health of children has profound effects on the health of the adults they will become. It acknowledges that the manifestations of health may vary for different communities and cultures and encompasses all aspects of health: physical, emotional, cognitive, and social health.

Domains of health

So how did the committee conceptualize the measurement of child health? First, it should be acknowledged that most commonly used measures are actually proxies of health or measures of only one aspect of the more complex construct embodied in the definition. For example, we might use body mass index to define obesity, or measure only cognitive functioning on a psychological test.

The model also emphasized the importance of tracking data on children’s health or aspects of their health on trajectories in a manner that is like the ways weight, length, are tracked. One cannot know the meaning of most isolated measures without knowing their place on a trajectory. For example, it is impossible to know if 20 pounds is a healthy weight or not without knowing the child’s age and prior weights. Similarly, one would have trouble determining the developmental health of child who speaks in 3-word sentences without knowing his age and whether his language was previously more or less advanced. Assessing trajectories was viewed as an essential part of efforts to improve children’s health. This requires longitudinal data.

Nevertheless, the committee conceptualized three domains of health that should be the basis for measuring child health: Health conditions : disorders or illnesses of body systems; Functioning : manifestation of health on an individual’s daily life, and Health potential : development of assets and positive aspects of health, such as resilience, competence, capacity, and developmental potential.

In considering the measurement of health conditions, it is important to note that these conditions can either be acute or chronic. Health conditions are the most traditional way of measuring health –or its absence. These conditions are usually inventoried by clinician diagnoses or by questionnaires inquiring about specific conditions or diseases. Those that are chronic can be assessed using two major approaches. The first is using a list or inventory of individual conditions. However, the list of such conditions is extensive because of the large number of uncommon disorders, and no list can be complete and be feasible to administer. Unfortunately, evidence shows that the more examples that are provided on a list, the more likely people will respond to the option of “or any other condition.” This finding is clearly counterintuitive and limits the utility of a list approach.

Another method of inventorying chronic conditions depends on a non-categorical or generic approach. 9 , 10 , 11 This approach explores the consequences of conditions, as well as their duration, based on a noncategorical definition. 12 The definition includes having a condition that lasts or is expected to last a year and having at least one of three types of consequences of conditions: Increased use of health care beyond the usual for age; dependence on a compensatory mechanism or assistance to function in a typical way; or the presence of functional limitations. 12 Three instruments that operationalize that definition have been developed and are in use. 13 , 14 , 15 , 16

This approach allows the identification of children with ongoing conditions without having to name the condition. A non-categorical approach is now incorporated into several national surveys using the shortest of these instruments, the CSHCN Screener. 15 It is used to track both the number of children with conditions and disparities in the ways in which care is delivered to children both with and without ongoing conditions.

Functioning has been defined by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health as “an umbrella term for body function, body structures, activities and participation. It denotes the positive or neutral aspects of the interaction between a person’s health condition(s) and that individual’s contextual factors (environmental and personal factors)” ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/icfoverview_finalforwho10sept.pdf ). Functioning is viewed as the way in which an individual can do things and is the final expression of health of individuals. One strength of this type of measure is that it can assess the consequences of many coexisting conditions and both conditions and their treatment. This is not something that is possible to assess when considering conditions as proposed above. Even when multiple conditions are inventoried individually, it does not give any indication of their combined effect on the child’s health. Also, in some instances, there are more symptoms or impairments from the treatment than from the condition itself, such as when encountering serious side effects from chemotherapy, during treatment or when the original condition itself is in remission. There are few other ways in which to get the type of summative information that can be obtained by assessing functioning. 17

There are relatively few measures of functional limitations specifically developed for children. Many of the measures of functioning in the past have focused on gross motor functioning and some of them measure only one type of functioning, such as cognition, which is measured by a range of psychological tests. More recently there have been attempts to develop more comprehensive measures. Few of them work across populations, culture, levels of health/disability and ages. Some more comprehensive measures are age specific, such as measures of development or of school readiness. 18 In general, such measures assess a range of skills including independence, physical, social, cognitive, emotional, and language skills. Nevertheless, there are few functional measures that work across populations, cultures, levels of health/disability and ages. Among the range of measures that are broader and in use are FSII (R) 19 ; Wee FIM 20 and Functional Status Scale 21 and health quality of life measures. 22 Each of them has a different focus and measures different aspects of functioning.

There are even fewer measures of health potential, but this is an important area for future research. This domain is critical to improving understanding of why some children experiencing a major stress are able to bounce back and overcome the trauma, while others are stunted in their further development, or never rebound at all. Some areas that are included are resilience, problem solving ability, resistance to illness, immunization status, ability to develop positive peer relations, and physical fitness. How these factors fit together and become protective is an area worthy of exploration, but clearly some children differentiate themselves from others by their ability to rebound from adversity or illness, while others suffer long-term consequences of poor health and well-being.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that the entire field of measurement is complicated by the fact that many children, especially younger ones cannot reliably respond to questionnaires on their own. As a result, most measures require responses from other individuals, typically caregivers. Others are completed by clinicians. Their biases and differences in their frames of reference may further complicate all these measures.

Factors influencing health

In exploring the issue of risk and protective factors that influence and affect health status, the committee realized that many known factors did not fall neatly into either category. In some cases, it was because they may be both risks and protective depending on the context (i.e: peer groups). In others, it’s effect was dependent on the level of exposure, as might be characterized by iron on iodine, both of which can cause problems if they are insufficient or be toxic if exposure is excessive.

Rather than think of them in terms of risk or protective factors, the committee chose to conceptualize the factors that affect child health as influences , since many may be both risks and protective, depending on the context and level of exposure.

The influences were grouped into six categories following the model of Healthy People 2010, which was the operant model at the time. 23 One objection to that model was that it was very linear, something that seemed at odds to the ways in which influences are understood to interact. However, the committee thought that the major categories or domains in the model that affected health were sound. These components were: biology, behavior, physical environment, social influences, services, and policy. Another significant modification of the Healthy People 2010 model was the considerable expansion of services and policy domains beyond those of health policy and health services, which was the original intent of the 2010 model. This is because the committee recognized that a wide range of services (e.g. education, welfare, and sanitation services) and policies (e.g. tax, law enforcement, road safety and environmental policies) have considerable impact on child health. Each of these categories was conceptualize as having many elements within them. A partial list of components of these domains is shown in Table  1 . Both within the groupings and across groupings these influences interact with one another and their relative importance changes over time and through development. Some of these changes are predictable and others depend on what the individual child experiences. For example, in early childhood the family is probably the most important social influence, while later in development other components, such as the community and the peer group, have greater impact. In terms of unique experiences, changes in the family composition or family dislocation, illness or toxic exposures may have great impact in one child’s development, in contrast with those who experience long term stability.

A new model

Altogether various influences interact over time and throughout development in a way that can be compared to and visualized as being like a kaleidoscope. That is to say, the patterns that emerge are partly determined by the initial constellation of factors at the time of the child’s birth. All prior exposures are embedded in his or her biology at birth and are incorporated into the initial template. But two individuals with different initial patterns will react differently to subsequent influences, even when they are exposed to the identical ones. Moreover, influences that are experienced by the individual at different stages of development will also have discrete effects, depending on when they are experienced. As a result, two children with different preexisting templates may react differently and their subsequent health will reflect those differences.

A picture of the component influences at any given time can be visualized as a Venn diagram (Fig.  1 ). Within each component, there are many subcomponents, as discussed in the section on influences, and each of those subcomponents may be of different importance at a given time and stage. They may be viewed as mini kaleidoscopes within the domain and are also similar to the whole domain in that they vary in their importance throughout development.

Multiple interacting influences.

As things change during a child’s development and over time, the kaleidoscope changes, depending on how the influences affect the individual or group of children (Fig.  2 ). The ways in which influences of various types affect a given child will depend on the arrangements of the preexisting template at the time of the new experience. This is like giving a twist to the crystals in the kaleidoscope, in which different sets of crystals will produce differing patterns.

Model of children’s health and its influences.

Additionally, the committee also recognized that there are some periods of time that are critical or sensitive and have magnified impact on health and development. Critical periods are ones in which an influence has a determinative effect on health, such as early prenatal exposure to Thalidamide during a critical period of embryogenesis, while sensitive periods are ones in which there is increased vulnerability, but no absolute effect. During these periods, exposure to certain influences has a more significant impact. For example, children who are not exposed to language in early infancy, may not recoup that loss completely, while that same lack of exposure later in development may have a far smaller effect. Similarly, parental separation or death may have different consequences depending on both the child’s template at the time of the occurrence and the age at which the trauma is experienced.

Nature vs nurture

For many generations people have argued about the role of nature versus nurture in determining health outcomes. However, in the last several decades this debate finally has some important answers, and we are finally beginning to understand how environments “get under our skin.” Since the mapping of the human genome, we have learned that the environment affects and alters the expression of our genes mainly by upregulating and down regulating them through epigenetic mechanisms. At other times exposures to specific influences actually interfere with gene replication and expression in a more deterministic fashion, as when there is exposure to radiation that alters the genes themselves.

Moreover, we now understand that adverse childhood experiences produce toxic stress and that when the allostatic load becomes too great, it produces changes in gene expression through epigenetic mechanisms. The ensuing changes affect multiple body systems including the brain, autonomic, neuroendocrine, immune, cardiovascular, and gastro-intestinal systems. 24 , 25 These changes have been associated with chronic inflammation, something that may affect long-term health and survival and sometimes can even be passed to the next generation, as has been shown for the effects of racism. Epidemiologic studies have long supported that increasing numbers of childhood exposures to these forms of stress are associated with physical and mental illness and premature death in adulthood. 26 , 27

It is important to also acknowledge the critical role that caregivers play in nurturing children and in buffering them against the noxious effects of stresses. This nurturance and buffering effect is something that is critical in helping children to thrive in spite of influences that threaten their health. It is also likely that those buffers are of special importance at times of transition in growth and development.

Implications

The implications of the committee’s definition and model of health are far reaching. One inherent implication of the model is that we can never measure all the factors that influence child health in any single study. As a result, it brings a new perspective to some of our efforts to interpret research data. For example, if two studies of outcomes of very low birth weight infants come to somewhat different conclusions about predictors of outcome, our tendency has been to try to determine which study was flawed and which was more reliable. Perhaps, instead we should question whether the subjects differed in some unmeasured, but significant, way that influenced their outcome.

The model also emphasizes that health does not derive primarily from medical care. In doing so it brings into question the ways in which our society divides budgets for the many kinds of services and policies that contribute to health and healthy development. The effects of decisions in these domains often omit consideration of their impact on children’s health and well-being. Some have suggested that we should have a process like our consideration of environmental impact for projects that would consider child health impact when new projects or policies are put into effect.

Finally, the model underscores the long reach of childhood influences on adult health. This is far more appreciated now, than at the time of the committee report, because of several factors. First is the increased understanding of epigenetics and the long-term implications of changes in gene expression. Another factor is the growing literature on the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACES). It is now unquestionable that these societal issues impact both child wellbeing and adult health and survival. Our awareness of these factors has also led to far more consideration of other social factors, and to the appreciation of the influence of social determinants of health. These include economic stability, education access and quality, health care access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, social and community context ( https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-determinants-health ) – a list quite like those in the Committee’s model.

The growing awareness of the long reach of child health is important for the field of pediatrics, which has long suffered from a lack of investment. This is a result of the degree to which finances have driven investment in health and health care. In general child health costs are so much lower than the costs of adult care, except for care of the very low birth weight infant and certain malignancies. As appreciation grows for the importance of environmental factors during childhood on ultimate health, we can hope that investments increase in relatively low-cost preventive measures that may alter longer term outcomes.

Future projections

Given our increased knowledge about the impact of environment and life events on children, we would be remiss if we did not highlight the changing nature of the world in which we live. The numerous wars around the world are massively disrupting children’s lives and causing mass migration. The COVID pandemic caused millions of deaths, including those of many caregivers, and world-wide disruption of daily life with loss of educational and social opportunities for countless numbers of children. Many of these losses appear to be having long-reaching impact on their education, development, and mental health. 28 Additionally, the direct and indirect effects of climate change, which is making some areas of the globe less habitable, and subjecting others to catastrophic weather event, fires, and floods, are producing massive dislocations. Many of these influences are affecting the children who are already most vulnerable.

When children experience these catastrophes, it has lasting effects on their health and developmental trajectories. In addition to the frequent events themselves, they are often accompanied by loss of caregivers, whose protection is so important to helping children deal with stresses, and to loss of routines, which provide stability and a sense of normalcy. Additionally, they often lose educational opportunities that would enable them to develop skills that would improve their future welfare. Even when there are no direct physical or observable injuries, all these factors increase children’s allostatic load and are embedded in their gene expression, causing inflammation and premature aging of many body systems, and setting them up for future poor health. It is important for the child health community to do all that it can to help buffer these effects and to help inform policy makers of their long impacts and costs to the individual and to society. The definition and model inform the child health community that our failure to do so is likely to be accompanied by a generation whose health and well-being is in peril.

Conclusions

We believe that the definition that the committee adopted and the model of how health evolves has had a major impact on thinking in the field. To some extent it forecast the CDC’s Health People 2020’s model of health “that recognized a life stages perspective. This approach recognizes that specific risk factors and determinants of health vary across the life span. Health and disease result from the accumulation (over time) of the effects of risk factors and determinants” ( https://wayback.archive-it.org/5774/20220413162937/https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/leading-health-indicators/Leading-Health-Indicators-Development-and-Framework ). The emphasis on child development may have had some role in helping other clinicians to focus on the fact that development does not stop when one reaches adulthood. It is entirely compatible with the Healthy People 2030’s goal to “Create social, physical, and economic environments that promote attaining the full potential for health and well-being for all” 29 and can serve as a guiding principle for pediatrics and our society. It suggests that society should want to invest in children because they are our nation’s most important resource. The definition of child health presented by the committee has many useful principles that can guide our research, clinical care, and policies to try to protect long-term thriving of the maximum number of children. It is one that can continue to guide our work for many decades to come.

Kempe, C. H. et al. The Battered Child. JAMA 181 , 17–24 (1962).

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Haggerty, R. J. Roghmann, K., Pless, I. B. Child Health and the Community (A Wiley International, 1975).

Engel, G. L. The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science 196 , 129–136 (1977).

Bolton, D., Gillett, G. Chapter 1, The biopsychosocial model 40 years on. In: The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: New Philosophical and Scientific Developments. Cham (CH): Palgrave Pivot; 2019. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11899-0_1 .

Sameroff, A. Transactional Models in Early Social Relations Human Development No. 1/2. The Development of Dialectical Operations (Part I). Hum. Dev. 18 , 65–79 (1975).

Bronfenbrenner, U. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and by Design (Harvard University Press, 1979).

National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. Children’s Health, The Nation’s Wealth: Assessing and Improving Child Health . Committee on the Evaluation of Children’s Health. Board of Children, Youth and Families, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Washington, D.C. (The National Academies Press, 2004).

Mcqueen, D. V. & De Salazar, L. Health promotion, the Ottawa Charter and ‘developing personal skills’: a compact history of 25 years. Health Promot. Int. Dec. 26 , ii194–ii201 (2011).

Google Scholar  

Pless, I. B. and Pinkerton, P. Chronic Childhood Disorders: Promoting Patterns of Adjustment (Kimpton, 1975).

Stein, R. E. K. To be or not to be…Noncategorical. J. Dev. Behav. Pediatrics 17 , 36–37 (1996).

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Stein, R. E. K. & Jessop, D. J. What diagnosis does not tell? The case for a noncategorical approach to chronic illness in childhood. Social Sci. Med. 29 , 769–778 (1989).

Stein, R. E. K., Bauman, L. J., Westbrook, L. E., Coupey, S. M. & Ireys, H. T. Framework for identifying children who have chronic conditions: The case for a new definition. J. Pediatrics 122 , 342–347 (1993).

Stein, R. E. K., Westbrook, L. E. & Bauman, L. J. The questionnaire for identifying children with chronic conditions (QuICCC): A measure based on a noncategorical approach. Pediatrics 99 , 513–521 (1997).

Stein, R. E. K., Silver, E. J. & Bauman, L. J. Shortening the questionnaire for identifying children with chronic conditions (QuICCC): What is the consequence? Pediatrics 107 , pe61 (2001).

Article   Google Scholar  

Bethell, C. et al. Identifying Children with Special Health Care Needs: Development and evaluation of a short screening instrument. Ambul. Pediatrics 2 , 38–48 (2002).

Bethell, C. Taking Stock of the CSHCN Screener: A Review of Common Questions and Current Reflections. Acad. Pediatrics 15 , 165–176 (2015).

Stein, R. E. K. et al. Severity of illness: Concepts and measurement. Lancet II-8574 , 1506–1509 (1987). (December 26th).

Williams, P. G. & Lerner, M. A. AAP Council on Early Childhood, AAP Council on School Health. School Readiness. Pediatrics. 144 , e20191766 (2019).

PubMed   Google Scholar  

Stein, R. E. K. & Jessop, D. J. Functional status II(R): A measure of child health status. Med. Care 28 , 1041–1055 (1990).

Msall, M. et al. The Functional Independence Measure for Children (WeeFIM). Conceptual basis and pilot use in children with developmental disabilities. Clin. Pediatr. 33 , 421–430 (1994).

Pollack, M. M. et al. Functional Status Scale: New Pediatric Outcome Measure. Pediatrics 124 , e18–e28 (2009).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Varni, J. W., Seid, M., Kurtin P. S. PedsQL™ 4.0: Reliability and validity of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ Version 4.0 Generic Core Scales in healthy and patient populations. Med. Care 39 , 800–812 (2001).

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Healthy People 2010 Report (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000) p. 30.

National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development. From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (National Academy Press, 2000).

National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Connecting the Brain to the Rest of the Body: Early Childhood Development and Lifelong Health Are Deeply Intertwined. Working Paper No. 15. www.developingchild.harvard.edu (2020).

Hughes, K. et al. The effect of multiple adverse childhood experiences on health: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet Public Health 2 , e356–e366 (2017).

Felitti, V. J. The Relation Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead. Perm J. Winter 6 , 44–47 (2002).

Mulkey, S. B., Bearer, C. B., Molloy, E. J. Indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children relate to the child’s age and experience. Pediatric Res. 94 , 1586–1587 (2023).

Healthy People 2030, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Retrieved from https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/social-determinants-health .

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Professor of Pediatrics Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, 1300 Morris Park Avenue, VE 6B27, Bronx, NY, 10461, USA

Ruth E. K. Stein

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ruth E. K. Stein .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

I have no financial conflicts of interest. I was a member of the committee whose work is cited in the article. There was no grant support for this manuscript.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Stein, R.E.K. Defining child health in the 21st century. Pediatr Res (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-024-03423-w

Download citation

Received : 15 April 2024

Accepted : 25 June 2024

Published : 26 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-024-03423-w

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for some event or problem. For a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. [1] [2]

• 2 Statistics
• 3 Hypothesis Media
• 4 Related pages
• 5 References
• 6 Other websites

In the early 17th century, Cardinal Bellarmine gave a well known example of the older sense of the word in his warning to Galileo : that he must not treat the motion of the Earth as a reality, but merely as a hypothesis.

Today, a hypothesis refers to an idea that needs to be tested . A hypothesis needs more work by the researcher in order to check it. A tested hypothesis that works may become part of a theory —or become a theory itself. The testing should be an attempt to prove that the hypothesis is wrong. That is, there should be a way to falsify the hypothesis, at least in principle if not in practice.

People often call a hypothesis an "educated guess".

Experimenters may test and reject several hypotheses, before solving the problem or reaching a satisfactory theory.

A 'working hypothesis' is just a rough kind of hypothesis that is provisionally accepted as a basis for further research. [5] The hope is that a theory will be produced, even if the hypothesis ultimately fails. [6] [7]

Hypotheses are especially important in science. Several philosophers have said that without hypotheses, there could be no science. [8] In recent years, philosophers of science have tried to integrate the various approaches to testing hypotheses (and the scientific method in general), to form a more complete system. The point is that hypotheses are suggested ideas , which are then tested by experiments or observations .

In statistics , people talk about correlation : correlation is how closely related two events or phenomena are. A proposition (or hypothesis) that two events are related cannot be tested in the same way as a law of nature can be tested. An example would be to see if some drug is effective to treat a given medical condition. Even if there is a strong correlation that indicates that this is the case, some samples would still not fit the hypothesis.

There are two hypotheses in statistical tests, called the null hypothesis , often written as [math]\displaystyle{ H_0 }[/math] , and the alternative hypothesis , often written as [math]\displaystyle{ H_a }[/math] . [9] The null hypothesis states that there is no link between the phenomena, [10] and is usually assumed to be true until it can be proven wrong beyond a reasonable doubt. [11] The alternative hypothesis states that there is some kind of link. It is usually the opposite of the null hypothesis, and is what one would conclude if null hypothesis is rejected. [12] The alternative hypothesis may take several forms. It can be two-sided (for example: there is some effect, in a yet unknown direction) or one-sided (the direction of the supposed relation, positive or negative, is fixed in advance). [11]

Hypothesis Media

The hypothesis of Andreas Cellarius , showing the planetary motions in eccentric and epicyclical orbits .

Related pages

• Falsifiability
• Gaia hypothesis
• Null hypothesis
• Occam's razor
• Statistical hypothesis test
• Thought experiment
• ↑ The term comes from the Greek , hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose".
• ↑ Bunge, Mario 1967. Scientific research I: the search for system . Berlin: Springer Verlag, Chapter 5, p222.
• ↑ Richard Feynman (1965) The character of physical law . p156
• ↑ Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science & Medicine Eprint via Answers.com
• ↑ See in "hypothesis", Century Dictionary Supplement , v. 1, 1909, New York: Century Company. Reprinted, v. 11, p. 616 (via Internet Archive ) of the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia , 1911.
• ↑ Schick, Theodore; Vaughn, Lewis (2002). How to think about weird things: critical thinking for a New Age . Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. ISBN   0-7674-2048-9 .
• ↑ Medawar P.B. & J.S. 1983. Aristotle to zoos: a philosophical dictionary of biology . Harvard University Press, p148. ISBN   0-674-04537-8
• ↑ "List of Probability and Statistics Symbols" . Math Vault . 2020-04-26 . Retrieved 2020-09-22 .
• ↑ or that the link does not have the form given by the alternative hypothesis
• ↑ 11.0 11.1 "Null and Alternative Hypotheses | Introduction to Statistics" . courses.lumenlearning.com . Retrieved 2020-09-22 .
• ↑ "Introductory Statistics: Null and Alternative Hypotheses" . opentextbc.ca . Archived from the original on June 11, 2021 . Retrieved September 22, 2020 .

Other websites

• Research and evaluation glossary
• Analysis and synthesis - on scientific method, based on a study by Bernhard Riemann from the Swedish Morphological Society

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes

‘Hurried Child Syndrome’ Is Trending—Here’s What It Means

New research is bringing attention to this term and here's why it can be a bad thing.

You may remember Alex P. Keaton, the teen in a big rush to grow up and take on the world, as played by Michael J. Fox on the '80s sitcom Family Ties . More recent examples of kids who seem to have grown up prematurely include Manny Delgado from Modern Family and even 1-year-old Stewie Griffin from Family Guy .

Although these depictions are funny, and fictional, they highlight a real issue in our society with kids being made to act more like mini-adults than, well, kids. Many times, it’s parents who are pushing their offspring to achieve beyond their age, although we may not even know we are placing pressure on those we love the most.

GettyImages/Imgorthand

The phenomenon has a name, “hurried child syndrome,” and parents are bringing attention to it on TikTok . Research shows it can lead children to have depression, anxiety, and poor academic performance. Sanam Hafeez, PsyD, a New York City-based neuropsychologist and director of Comprehend the Mind, says it’s actually an “epidemic.” 

'Hurried Child Syndrome' Meaning

“Hurried child syndrome” is when kids are rushed through their childhood and forced to act beyond their maturity level.

“Children are pushed to grow up too soon, taking on the worries, responsibilities, and stresses of adult life," says Dr. Hafeez. This is happening in all areas of their lives, including school, extracurricular activities and sports , and even social lives.

Thomas Priolo, MD, a psychiatrist at the Jersey Shore University Medical Center, tells Parents that examples of "hurried child syndrome" may include tutoring kids beyond age-appropriate levels, parents oversharing marital or financial concerns with their children, a hyper-focus on winning or competition, and the expectation of constant discipline. 

The term “hurried child syndrome” was coined by the U.S.-based child psychologist David Elkind , PhD, in the 1980s, but the phenomenon existed long before that in some form.

As Dr. Hafeez notes, there have been times throughout history when kids have been forced to take on very adult responsibilities, such as during war.

“The modern version of the syndrome is perhaps more structured and pressurized due to competitive educational systems and demands for societal success,” Dr. Hafeez says.

'Hurried Child Syndrome' Can Start Early in Life

As early as preschool age—and sometimes younger—kids are showing the hallmarks of "hurried child syndrome," according to Dr. Hafeez. “Some parents sign toddlers up for several classes—everything from language lessons to sports—believing that getting a head start is desirable,” she says.

But with parents emphasizing early achievement and setting the groundwork for future success, they can be doing their child a disservice. Little ones can experience stress and burnout, when they should be focusing on developing social and emotional skills, especially through pretend play.

“Parents may have the best of intentions, with the goal of raising an exceptional child, however sometimes these demands are counterproductive and will negatively impact child growth and development,” agrees Dr. Priolo. 

Parents should take comfort in knowing that many of us don’t mean to push our kids to grow up too quickly. There are also many pressures being exerted on moms, dads, and caregivers to give our kids every advantage in life.

'Hurried Child Syndrome' Causes

It’s our job to give our kids the best life possible. That means helping them succeed in school, athletics, socially, and in their future endeavors. But sometimes, parents accidentally take things too far.

“Although we may understand the need for ‘kids to be kids,’ our own unconscious anxieties lead us to a more demanding parenting style ," says Dr. Priolo.

That may look like too much structure and pressure, according to Dr. Hafeez, who adds, “Several external forces conspire against parents in their efforts to keep the 'hurried child syndrome' at bay, and that causes them to inadvertently fast-track their children’s childhoods.”

From competition in education ramping up constantly, to a greater awareness of what peers are doing thanks to social media , a sense of urgency can plague parents that they aren’t doing enough.

“Cultural norms emphasizing achievement and success can lead parents to believe that a lack of early success will hamper their children’s chances of future opportunities,” says Dr. Hafeez.

There are even more factors at play, with Dr. Hafeez pointing out that economic pressure can lead parents to seek out structured activities as a child care option.

Ultimately, Dr. Hafeez says, “These outside pressures produce a no-escape, high-pressure situation for parents who are often sufficiently unaware of its emotional cost on kids.”

How To Avoid 'Hurried Child Syndrome'

For Dr. Priolo, avoiding "hurried child syndrome" is about providing a supportive and nurturing environment for kids in which downtime is valued, their feelings are validated, and mistakes are allowed to happen. “The predominant factor in child success has always revolved around a supportive environment consisting of age-appropriate demands,” he says. 

To that end, instead of a packed Monday through Saturday of structured activities, a young developing brain would greatly benefit from unstructured playtime . “Although parents may feel like this is ‘ doing nothing ,’ this time allows the child a safe environment to absorb, process, and apply new information,” Dr. Priolo shares.

Meanwhile, reducing kids’ exposure to technology is another way to encourage free play and exploration. “Social scientists have found that children who are permitted to experience the world in this way develop greater emotional resilience and are better equipped to solve problems,” Dr. Hafeez says.

Giving kids the choice to pursue their interests is also key. Dr. Priolo says that when age-appropriate, kids should set goals that are meaningful for them, and parents should be supportive. “Importantly, parents should display appreciation and provide positive affirmations , even when mistakes or failures happen,” he says.

Dr. Hafeez stresses that kids’ self worth should be based on more than school and performance achievements. Finally, she says when parents model healthy work/life balance, “They are showing children that making mistakes and experiencing life’s simpler pleasures are important ingredients to a happy and fulfilling life.”

'Hurried Child Syndrome' Warning Signs

Even the best-intentioned parents can fall into the trap of bringing kids along too far, too fast. Here are some signs that your child is feeling overly pressured to grow up:

• An increase in stress or anxiety
• Loss of playtime
• Social strain or separation anxiety
• Poor self-esteem
• A tendency toward perfectionism
• Refusing or resisting going to school
• Memory lapses or poor attention span
• Exaggerated worry about upcoming performances, sports matches, or tests
• Hyperactivity
• Physical symptoms, such as headache and tummy ache

“A child may have difficulty reporting these symptoms,” Dr. Priolo says, adding that parents should closely observe and monitor them.

And Dr. Hafeez advises, “Recognizing these signs early can help parents slow the pace and lower the stakes.”

Hurried Child Syndrome in Schools: A Blessing or Curse? Understanding the Causes and Implications on the Well-Being of the Hurried Child in Ebonyi State, Nigeria . Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work . 2024.

The hurried child syndrome . International Journal of Research in Paediatric Nursing . 2019.

The Many Wondrous Benefits of Unstructured Play . American Psychological Association . 2023.

Screen time and young children: Promoting health and development in a digital world . Paediatr Child Health . 2017.

Related Articles

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis

Two paleontologists have turned on each other, each claiming to have found new evidence about the worst day on earth..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In August 2017, a bubbly Dutch pink-haired 28-year-old graduate student flew from Amsterdam to South Dakota, where empty fields rolled wide before her, towns of a hundred people and a single church. “You a celebrity or somethin’?” a man had said last time she was in the area, picking up a can of Monster at a truck stop. “Not to my knowledge,” she said. Melanie During had never been to New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, but she was already familiar with this particular landscape, dense with buried bone.

Also in town was a 70-year-old Dutch paleontologist named Jan Smit, a man she got to know the day she dissected an ostrich in his kitchen. With him was a stranger, a 35-year-old American graduate student. The three of them drove to what During casually calls “a triceratops mass grave,” at which point, to her surprise, Smit left.

For the next few days, it would be the two students and whatever the ground gave up. Her companion drove a 4Runner under the arc of a giant sky feathered with clouds, through panoramic prairie, fields of buffalo, mud buttes rising against the horizon. He pulled off a gravel road and right onto a ranch.

They got out of the truck. With each step, dry grass crunched under their feet and grasshoppers sprang in all directions. Through the knee-high thistle, it was hard to judge where each footfall would land. The grass stopped, and the earth dipped into a gnarled mass of rock and clay. The land was strange, full of odd textures, scaly in spots, darkly reptilian, and blanched out in others. He was proud of the place. While the site was not technically his property, it was spiritually his, shaped and carved and loved by him, and During was there with his permission. He called it Tanis, so everyone else did too.

Robert DePalma is solid and dark and affable and shares with During a certain kind of rough history, but he is, according to Smit, During’s foil. When During looks at a bone, she sees a chemical matrix waiting to be investigated. She sees an opportunity to extract information. When DePalma looks at a bone, he sees a narrative. He tells stories about the bones, some of them true.

“He is secretive,” says Smit. “Melanie cannot be more the opposite. She’s in all the social media. She makes herself known.” One way that she makes herself known is by posting pictures of herself cradling a model of a baby T. rex like a prehistoric Pietà (“sweet baby Jesus Rex,” she calls it on Instagram) or riding a giant reconstructed dinosaur like a cowboy atop a horse. “I have had a great deal of criticism directed at my work,” she once said, “which was actually criticism of my flamboyant personality, my big mouth.”

During would have only a handful of days at Tanis, but they were days unlike any she had seen before. On a normal dig, it is typical to find nothing of note for long stretches. “You pee in the bushes,” she says, “you get chased by snakes, you find no fossils.” Here, she would brush away clay and come upon a new texture and color — a precious fossil fish. The first sighting gave her goose bumps. Blowing on the fossil would have been too violent an approach; she might waft away the very thing she sought. She would begin to gently carve out sediment around the fossil, but there, astonishingly, would be another one. “A luxury problem,” she calls it, “stumbling on all these other fishes in the way.”

The exact location of the site remains secret, vulnerable as it is to poachers and rival paleontologists. Almost no one knew about the place in 2017, but a few years later there would be magazine features, multiple documentaries, conference presentations and journal papers. David Attenborough, science’s most beloved narrator, would tell his audience of a “truly extraordinary dig site” against a backdrop of an asteroid hurtling through space. “No one has ever found the fossil of a dinosaur that they know for certain died as a result of the impact,” Attenborough would say. “This place might hold evidence of one of the most dramatic events in all the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of our planet.” The New Yorker would publish a feature centering DePalma as a controversial young scientist with a major discovery.

During and DePalma both believed the fish at Tanis died in a violent flood less than an hour after an asteroid hit the Earth, killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. This is why they found fish pointing in both directions, their bodies broken and speared with debris; like a pool in an earthquake, the river rocked back and forth, throwing sea life upward to land wherever it might fall and be entombed in layers of mud. “A car crash frozen in place,” as During puts it, a freeze-frame from 66 million years back. They would both converge on the same mystery, tunneling toward greater precision: In what season had the asteroid struck?

DePalma had set up two tents for them off-site, close to town, where they would sleep and have downtime, though downtime is not something During has ever really appreciated (“I don’t sit down and watch things” is her take on TV). All day long, in temperatures inching toward 100, they crouched over the delicate petrified remains of sturgeon and paddlefish, trying to position their feet such that they could draw remnants from sediment without crushing something that had survived 66 million years intact. They smacked at biting flies. They dug through hot days and slept in tents that failed to keep out the rain.

“Personality-wise, and this is really not about personalities … I mean, I don’t want to make it about personalities,” DePalma told me years later, resisting further specificity. “Personality-wise, she wasn’t necessarily someone I would normally be friends with.”

“I don’t want to judge people for how they come across on a personal level,” During told me, declining to elaborate, “but there were moments where I thought, It would’ve been very helpful if I could have just had a word with someone else. ”

None of what follows will make sense absent a single social fact: The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. Among the subfields, nastiness correlates with the size and carnivorousness of the creature under study, the comity possible among those who study ammonites being unlikely among those who study T. rex. A “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism” is how his biographer describes Sir Richard Owen, the man who coined the term dinosaur. The first two famous American paleontologists, the prickly academic Othniel Marsh and the gentleman naturalist Edward Cope, savaged each other in print, hired spies and counterspies, destroyed fossils, and generally worked harder to humiliate each other than to describe the boxes and boxes and boxes of remains they pulled from the extraordinarily rich fossil beds of the American West.

It would take years for the ten days During and DePalma spent together to spin into a scandal that consumed both of them. She would accuse him of research misconduct and fabricating data. He would accuse her of plagiarism and defamation. He would lose weight and have flashbacks to childhood bullies; stress would pose a risk to her first pregnancy. Disaster struck one day in the spring, they both decided in the end, and transformed everything that came after.

We don’t know how to read history in water; we know how to read it in bone. The West, in particular a 500-kilometer stretch of rock known as the Hell Creek Formation, is an ideal place to preserve fossils because it is given to collect sediment and it is dry. A bad place would be the tropics, where a dead animal is likely to be eaten before it can be buried. A bad place would be a mountain summit, where a skeleton would be swept off on the wind. A truly terrible place would be the waterlogged nation of the Netherlands, where amid all that peat and loam and sand only a single dinosaur species has been discovered and described. It is a strange place in which to be a paleontologist, but it is where Melanie During was born in 1989, in a land unsuited to fossilization to parents unsuited to parenting.

The little home in Langedijk was not one in which scientific insights seemed likely to develop. Melanie’s father was absent, and, according to her, “a twat.” Her mother was ADHD, autistic, and, by her own description, inadequate. “I was not fit to do the job alone,” she says, “and I was alone,” though she took pride in being a child with her four children, singing and painting and presenting them with great bags of clay they could, together, manifest into shape. Melanie’s ambition stood out to her family in North Holland. “She loves the spotlight,” says her sister, a trait perhaps more befitting the United States, the country that held all the treasure and the trouble to come.

The Dutch school system makes distinctions early, and 12-year-old Melanie was placed on the least intellectual of three tracks, headed not for university but for trade school. Did Melanie want to be a plumber or a hairdresser? No one in her family had been to university. The decision to place a student on such a path is made, sometimes, with the knowledge that not all parents are capable of helping with rigorous schoolwork. In Melanie’s telling, her mother forced the older sister out of the house, sent a younger sister to live with her father, and often disappeared herself, leaving 16-year-old Melanie alone to care for an autistic 6-year-old brother. She shoplifted soap and cheese and maxi pads. She stopped speaking for a time. She went into foster care.

After school, Melanie picked tulip bulbs, delivered newspapers, cut roses, waited tables. Social life was a struggle. “She had a feeling,” according to her mother, “that people didn’t like her.” When Melanie was about 15, her history teacher was concerned about the isolated, chubby girl who seemed to have surrendered the very idea of fitting in. “I was bullied, too,” the teacher told me. In front of the class, the teacher crumpled a piece of paper into a ball and flattened it back out. This, she said, is what happens when you bully someone and then apologize. The paper is never quite right again.

Melanie told the history teacher that she would like to go to university but doubted this would be possible. The history teacher devised a complicated plan of tests and classes. Melanie followed the plan and thrived. Having had to take care of herself for much of her childhood, find a bed, find dinner, she was too independent for her foster parents and successfully petitioned to be emancipated at the age of 17.

By 2017, During was a master’s student in earth sciences at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit working on her thesis. She was examining rocks from a Dutch quarry using a method called stable-isotope analysis. To her great disappointment, she could not find anything earth-shattering to share. “All I could say,” she recalls, “was it was very hot and it was very saline.”

Avoiding work, During attended a lecture by Jan Smit on the occasion of his receiving the Netherlands’ highest award for earth sciences. Smit was talking about his trip to an extraordinary new paleontological site in North Dakota. The site was called Tanis. It occurred to her that if one performed stable-isotope analysis on the bones of the fish at Tanis, one could discover something about the moment in which they had died. Maybe she could find something more to say than: It was hot and salty. She began composing an email to Smit on her phone, right there in her seat, during his talk.

Smit already knew of this teaching assistant. She was the one who had asked him whether he had a pot large enough in which to boil an ostrich after she had procured an ostrich carcass and decided to dissect it for fun. “Somebody who wants to do something like that,” says Smit, “that’s a girl I like, who’s not afraid to do the experiment, is not afraid to make her hands dirty.” Smit told DePalma he had a student familiar with stable-isotope analysis, a subject in which DePalma had no particular training, and DePalma said she could visit. During had lots of ideas and no money. All her travel-grant applications were denied. Smit lent her the money to go to North Dakota.

The knowledge that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs is knowledge recently acquired; most paleontologists working today did not grow up learning that a rock six miles wide slammed into Earth and ended T. rex. The “Alvarez Hypothesis” was published in 1980, shortly after scientists found a layer of iridium locked in rock the world over and surmised that it could only have come from space. It is called the Alvarez Hypothesis and not the Smit Hypothesis because Luis Alvarez and his son Walter got their paper out before Jan Smit. As Peter Brannen put it in his excellent The Ends of the World, “The Alvarezes published first and were immortalized. Jan Smit doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.” Smit does seem to have acquired a page since the publication of Brannen’s book; under the heading “Known For,” the page reads: ALVAREZ HYPOTHESIS.

This is not to say that the idea was readily accepted; it sounded ridiculous, bombastic, childlike in its sudden simplicity, and the Alvarezes spent the ’80s arguing against those who attributed the end of the Cretaceous to excitable Indian volcanoes. In order to support his theory about a space rock with the force of 4.5 billion atomic bombs killing off giant reptiles, Alvarez had to find a crater the size of Connecticut. He looked in Iowa. He looked in the ocean; he was pretty sure it was in the ocean. He could not find it. If you’re so sure a massive asteroid felled the dinosaurs, the volcanists asked, why can’t you find this giant gaping hole? How hard could that even be? Conferences were held and concluded, craterless.

In fact, the crater had already been found, in the Yucatán, by a gregarious, eccentric oil-seeking PEMEX geophysicist named Glen Penfield. Penfield noted anomalies in a magnetic field, charted it with paper and a pencil, found a circle the size of Connecticut, and surmised, before anyone else, that he had found the crater in question. He called Walter Alvarez, left a message, and got no response. (“A mediocre geologist,” Penfield calls him now.) He tried telling NASA and was rebuffed. He had been trying to share the news about it for a decade, but the attitude, according to Penfield, was “This kid doesn’t even have a doctorate” and it’s “not worth talking to some oil guy.” He spent a considerable amount of time, he told me, depressed that no one would hear him, not even a mediocre geologist whose reputation hinged on this very information. He named the crater Chicxulub specifically “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it after a decade of their dismissals.” Yucatán Crater would have been too easy for them.

It was before grass, before beans, before the 24-hour day. In film, this has been represented as a man gazing into the sky as a rock floats into his field of vision, but this is a confusion born of our inability to understand speed and scale. You would have not had a moment to turn toward the sky; as Brannen explains, the rock, six miles long, shot from the height of an airborne 747 to the ground in .3 seconds and continued onward toward the center of the Earth, 12 miles into crust. In its wake it left a vacuum that sucked in shattered and melted masses of this planet and shot them into space. The shock traveled through the oceans; tsunamis hundreds of feet tall rose skyward. Bits of earth, ejected into space, fell back through our atmosphere on fire, a rain of flame. The surface of the planet grew hot as an oven set to broil. T. rex , triceratops: These were not creatures designed to hide. A layer of iridium settled over the globe, to be buried by millions of years of sediment and discovered by Jan Smit 66 million years and a few weeks too late. In the same layer, known as the K-Pg Boundary, geologists would find tektites — bits of earth that shot into space when the asteroid hit, turned glassy with the heat of the atmosphere, and fell back to the surface. Smit called the smallest ones spherules. That DePalma claims to have found spherules all over Tanis is some of the strongest evidence for the site being a historical record of impact. Spherules appear in sediment like gnarled bits of clay. They look sometimes like BBs; when they’ve fused together, they look like Nerds.

DePalma did not find Tanis. The site was found on a piece of private property by two prospectors who had a modest business bringing fossil enthusiasts to the Dakotas. A good day for Steve Nicklas or Rob Sula, who paid ranchers for access to the site, would mean coming upon a fish tooth or a fragment of fish spine. Most fossil finds are a pile of puzzle pieces. On a single day at the ranch in 2008, they came upon a fragment of a sturgeon skull, brushed off some sediment, and found an entire articulated sturgeon. “We knew it was important right then,” says Sula. “Three-dimensional. There were scales on this thing. It was obviously super-gentle preservation.” Nicklas and Sula began to dig it out with a scalpel. “Once we uncovered the first fish,” he says, “there was another one.” There were, in fact, dozens and dozens of 66-million-year-old fish, “stacked up like cordwood, multiple matrices with multiple densities.” It was difficult, thrilling work. “The single fully articulated sturgeon was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that,” says Sula, “let alone stacks of them!”

At least this much is indisputable: Nicklas and Sula located a Lagerstätte : a site of extraordinary preservation. They sent some fish to the Field Museum and called in an academic to assess what they had found. Nicklas called his friend, a dinosaur prospector named Ron Frithiof. Nicklas and Frithiof had something in common: They liked underdogs and distrusted institutions. Frithiof, in particular, feels “most academics are arrogant assholes.” But he knew one he liked, an academic who seemed like “a regular person.” His name was Robert DePalma, and he was just a kid, really — a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Kansas.

In Nicklas and Sula’s view, they had done DePalma a favor, and they continued to share the site with him for seven years. They were thus shocked, in 2019, to find themselves described in his celebratory New Yorker feature as private collectors who thought the site was “a bust” and so cluelessly passed it on to DePalma, who deemed them irresponsible for failing to properly excavate a dinosaur’s hip bone.

“That put me in a super-dark place,” Sula told me. “It was astounding how in a couple of sentences, they managed to marginalize us and omit us from history.”

Sula was upset enough to call The New Yorker and complain. Soon after that, a woman who helped run the ranch told Sula and Nicklas they weren’t welcome back; the family felt they weren’t following rules regarding fire safety. Sula was devastated. “It was a personal thing,” he says. “I loved that place. It was beautiful, and it was part of who I was.”

He still loves the place, but he’s not convinced it’s a record of the day the dinosaurs died. He thinks it might be what he always thought it was, a “fish site” with spectacular preservation. A lot of people do.

It remains a matter of dispute when and where and with what antecedent Melanie During came up with the idea for determining the season the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. But the idea was this: Sturgeon bones grow like tree rings, and the bone cells grow thickest in summer, when food is most plentiful. A slice of bone, then, should reveal a succession of seasons. Months of plenty would be thicker, as the fish grew fat on plankton. The outermost bone, the last stage of bone growth before the asteroid, should reveal the season of death.

During had a single year to finish her master’s thesis after her 2017 visit to Tanis, and she did not have the money to extend the time. If she did not finish the thesis, she would not graduate and would not be able to apply to Ph.D. programs. “When people tell you ‘Relax,’ I’m like, What’s that?  ” she told me. “What do you mean? Do I sit down and do nothing?”

She was not an expert in fossil fish, or histology, or the Late Cretaceous; she had learned isotope-analysis methodology only the previous year from her adviser, Jeroen van der Lubbe. She was a few years out of undergrad — not even a doctoral student. The demise of the non-avian dinosaurs is perhaps the best-known division in all of paleontology, a historical moment that reaches beyond the classroom into childhood nurseries. It is constituent of the way our culture structures the history of the universe, basic to the way we have come to categorize time itself. For a Dutch 20-something to believe she would contribute new information regarding this moment in a master’s thesis was potentially delusional, but During felt the fish from Tanis contained long-hidden knowledge the right methods might evoke.

Her first attempt to measure the growth lines was a failure, four months lost on a faulty technique. “It was a waste of my time to continue,” she says. “I don’t cry over spilled milk.” She had to beg and wheedle for equipment; she was expert in very little but unafraid to ask for help. In order to understand the chemical composition of her samples, she needed to understand what was the original bone and what was a chemical artifact of the process of fossilization. To do that required a Micro XRF spectrometer, which she did not have, but a friend in Brussels had access to one; she drove to Brussels, and there, for the first time, she clearly saw the growth lines in slices of bone.

During’s naïveté would be, over and over, her strength. She intended to measure the isotopic ratio between two molecules at different points in the growth lines. In a university building that still stands only because there is a nuclear reactor in the basement, in a room with a window taped against the wind, During positioned and repositioned a tiny slice of fish bone in a micromill. She came into the little room before dawn and left when it was dark. “You’re still here,” the lab manager, Suzan Warmerdam-Verdegaal, would say on her way out of the building. The mill produced specks of fossil, smaller than a grain of sand. One day, after she had labored for many hours to collect a few samples, a colleague opened the door. The samples wafted into the room, lost to her. That day, she did cry.

A bit of luck: At a dinner for During’s partner on the occasion of his doctoral defense, another scientist with connections to the European Synchrotron Facility offered her some time there — a valuable and vanishingly rare opportunity for a young academic. She told DePalma, and he mailed her a fish skull. She brought the skull to an 844-meter tunnel for speeding electrons, and shot through it beams of light a million times brighter than the sun. The scan revealed the interior and inside the gills, incredibly, little bits of trapped clay: spherules that had traveled from the Yucatán to space and fallen back to Earth to be inhaled by a doomed paddlefish.

Back in Amsterdam, During worked at the mill, but the bits of precious dust failed to accumulate in the way she had hoped. It was April; she was a student only until late August. She didn’t have money to continue her studies. It was Warmerdam-Verdegaal, the lab manager, who devised a solution. Even with very few samples, the isotopic analysis could be made to work with a cold trap, a piece of equipment the lab had but that no one in the lab had ever used for this purpose. She called During one day in May. “We have results to the end,” she said. During screamed and biked to the lab. After days of plotting graphs, she had it: These fish, the isotopic results confirmed, had died in spring.

She defended her master’s thesis in a dress she had sewn herself, in a print with triceratops and ankylosauruses marching across palm trees. It was late August, and the department was mostly empty; her adviser walked through the corridor pulling people into her defense so she would have someone to defend to. She had not only found seasonality but helped develop a new way to combine osteohistology and isotopic dating. Twelve years earlier, she had been a kid in foster care.

The thesis won the Dutch Escher Prize for the most outstanding master’s thesis in earth sciences. She sent it to DePalma and his co-authors, asking that they keep quiet because she planned on publishing the work later, with DePalma as a co-author, since he controlled the site and provided the fish.

Not long after, Smit received a lengthy email from DePalma. “I was naturally surprised to see that Melanie’s entire thesis, even the title, apparently became refocused specifically on determining the time of year,” he wrote. “There are serious ethical concerns here.” He claimed that the subject and methods had been “extracted directly” from the ongoing work of his research team. The idea for using histology to determine time of year, he said, originated with his colleague Gregory Erickson; she “explored a concept, technique, and research goals that were already being written up by us.” He wrote in a tone of deep agitation unsuccessfully masked by politesse. “I hope all of this gets sorted out in the best way possible” he concluded, “and I now have some valuable insight into what it is like to work with Melanie.”

Smit related the email to During, suggesting that it was all a misunderstanding soon to be resolved. But During was devastated. Now, she would never publish a paper on her work because the results would be contested, the path to a Ph.D. less clear. Now, someone else, someone equally ambitious and working against her, had the method she and her advisers had developed. I sent him, she thought, a fucking cookbook.

I get these all the time from crazy people,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. “People are always saying, ‘I discovered the Ark of the Covenant.’” He received such an email in 2012 from Robert DePalma when DePalma was a 30-year-old graduate student. “It was a very weird kind of secretive, extraordinarily hyperbolic email that said, ‘Look, I’ve made the most amazing discovery in the history of the planet. I found all this stuff that’ll change the way we view science in the world.’” This guy’s nuts, Johnson thought, and did not respond. The next time he came across DePalma was at a gathering of paleontologists and ranchers in Montana in 2016. DePalma clicked through pictures of himself and his old-style tent. He was writing by hand, on a table strewn with a pipe and a porcelain teacup. “With a lantern!” Johnson recalls. “Nobody uses a lantern!” DePalma described what he had found in Hell Creek. “He said, ‘I actually found a complete gecko in amber.’” In the published literature to date, no one has ever found a large section of amber in Hell Creek; one tends to find tiny pieces and in them microfossils. “To find an entire gecko in amber is, like, the holy grail,” says Johnson. This would have been a major, history-making discovery. “And he flashes this fuzzy image up on the screen and then takes it off, and then he leaves. And we’re all like, What the fuck was that?  ”

DePalma says he showed crisp slides of a partial gecko in a peanut-size nub of amber (and provided clear slides to New York ) but does not dispute the lantern. Cosplay is a word that comes up often in conversations about him; he favors an impractical leather hat, suspenders, dramatic looks into the distance. He digs with a pick possibly owned by an associate of Othniel Marsh, the original rapacious paleontologist, though he prefers the Quaker Cope. If many people, in discussing Robert DePalma’s sartorial choices, will feel the need to explain that Indiana Jones was not even a paleontologist (he was an archaeologist), it is worth noting that the field of paleontology has always had an element of costume.

While a grad student at the University of Kansas, DePalma led a research team that unearthed what he called Dakota-raptor, a 17-foot flightless winged carnivore he described to The Guardian as “the Ferrari of competitors” and “the most lethal animal you can possibly imagine into the paleoecology of that time period.” In the pictures he provided to the paper he wears a suit vest and holds a shovel like a 19th-century showman. Pretty much as soon as DePalma unveiled it, Dakotaraptor was controversial. Other researchers pointed out that the bones he had assembled contained a turtle shell. Such mistakes are easy to make; Marsh made fun of Cope mercilessly and repeatedly for attaching a plesiosaur’s skull to the end of its tail. DePalma, always sensitive to criticism, was attacked online for his possibly chimerical discovery. This was part of the reason Frithiof decided to give DePalma the tip about the “fish site.” He thought DePalma had been badly treated. He thought the kid deserved a break.

In the fall of 2016, DePalma publicly announced, at the annual Geological Society of America meeting, that he had found a mass grave full of spherules. The site had been created, he said, from a giant, deadly flood minutes to hours after the asteroid hit. It was the scene of our greatest natural disaster, hidden from us until now. Audible gasps rose from the crowd.

“I was incredulous,” says Johnson, who has been studying Hell Creek for decades, discovered in 1987 the first K-Pg Boundary site in North Dakota, wrote a book about Hell Creek, found a post-asteroid boundary layer with spherules fewer than two miles from Tanis, and is generally the leading expert on the geology and paleobiology of the region. After the conference, Johnson continued to hear of claims DePalma was making. “He proceeded to list a bunch of things that were outrageous. Like, ‘I found an egg of a pterosaur; I found dinosaur feathers.’”

On a trip to Hell Creek in 2016, when DePalma had the lease on Tanis but had not yet made his dramatic claims about it, Johnson and fellow paleontologist Tyler Lyson were engaged in a project to map the K-Pg Boundary along the entirety of Hell Creek. “I’ve been thinking about this sort of stuff basically my whole life,” says Lyson, a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who grew up fewer than 20 miles from Tanis. They ran into Sula and Nicklas, who invited them to check out the “fish site.” Lyson and Johnson measured its elevation. After the GSA talk, Lyson went back to his notes. “And I’m like, Dang, it’s much, much lower than you would expect. ” At first glance, at least, one would expect a site at that elevation would be older than 66 million years.

Even before his announcement at the GSA, DePalma began to bring journalists and scientists to Tanis. As a student working toward his Ph.D., DePalma contacted none other than Walter Alvarez, the man most associated with the asteroid itself. Alvarez visited the site, was convinced, and became a supporter. DePalma also contacted the novelist Douglas Preston, who visited the site in 2013 and wrote the article that would eventually appear in The New Yorker. Preston’s account is full of finds as shocking and world-shattering as the gecko in amber: a fossil feather, a dinosaur egg, and the remains of a mammal inside the very place it would have hid during the impact.

“Is that a burrow?” Preston asks in the piece.

“You’re darn right it is,” says DePalma.

Paleontologists were skeptical at the time, but their quotes to the media were measured: Let’s wait and see what he publishes. They would judge the findings by the peer-reviewed papers to come. Tyler Lyson did his own investigating. After the explosive GSA talk, Lyson got a three-by-two-foot block of Tanis dirt from Rob Sula, who had removed it before ceding control to DePalma. Lyson hadn’t opened it, but after reading the New Yorker article he prepped it in his museum in Denver. He found fish. He did not find spherules inside the fish. He did not find, in the dirt around those fish, a single spherule. His suspicion grew.

There have been, in the decade since DePalma claimed to have found a dinosaur feather, a mammal burrow, and a pterosaur egg, no resultant publications on these particular finds. Academic paleontologists must keep their fossils publicly accessible; they might be kept at the Field Museum or the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They are given accession numbers, attached to a museum or university, which researchers use to refer to and request them, as with library books. DePalma is associated with the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, which is a storefront in a mall, but his finds are not displayed there. When Frost Museum paleontologist Cary Woodruff called the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History asking for a cast of a Dakotaraptor claw DePalma had found, he was put off for about three years by an “exasperated and apologetic” museum employee. Finally, he says he was told by the museum that DePalma kept the bones in his home, in a safe. “As paleontologists,” Woodruff says, incredulous, “we do not store fossils at our house.” (DePalma, asked if he has kept bones at his home, suggests the employee was joking.) When I asked about the staggering fossils described in The New Yorker, DePalma said they were at Florida Atlantic University, where he teaches, and which did not respond to requests for comment.

Paleontologists who might have felt cautiously skeptical in 2019 are now openly and vocally baffled. “No one’s ever published a dinosaur feather from anywhere in North America,” says Johnson. “He has dinosaur feathers. Why didn’t he show us a picture of them? That’d be the cover of Nature. If he had a pterosaur egg, why didn’t he publish? These would be amazing, major discoveries if they were true. “

In the New Yorker feature, DePalma unwraps “a sixteen-inch fossil feather” and holds it “in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass.” “I mean this is just some cartoon, made-up idea of what paleontology is like,” says Jingmai O’Conner, the Field Museum curator who spent ten years working in China, where most fossil feathers have been found. “Fossil feathers don’t preserve three dimensionally in ways that you could hold them, unless they’re in amber. But then you’re actually holding a chunk of amber.”

Greg Wilson Mantilla of the University of Washington is the foremost expert on Late Cretaceous mammals of Hell Creek, a subject he has studied intensively for 25 years. In a day of digging, he says, “you might find a molar of a mammal and know that the mammal was contemporaneous with all the other little pieces that you’re finding. At best we’ll find a jaw that has a couple of teeth in it. That’s a red-letter day.” DePalma has claimed to have not only found a mammal jaw and shoulder bone, but to have found them inside an intact mammal burrow that crosses the K-Pg Boundary. Wilson Mantilla, having devoted his life to this narrow realm of study, would very much like to see the fossils, but his extensive efforts to coordinate with DePalma have not borne out. When they met at a conference, Wilson Mantilla says, DePalma was solicitous and admiring. “He said, ‘I’d love to get you out to the site and, you know, get you the specimen to look at.’ And so I followed up with him. But this began a series of, um, basically exchanges that never amounted to anything. He either didn’t respond to me or promised that I could come out to the field site, just contact him when I get out to Montana, and then I’d link up with him in North Dakota. And it just — everything always fell through.”

The questions swirling around DePalma necessarily implicate his most fundamental claim: the legitimacy of Tanis as the single site known to record the last moments of the Cretaceous. In 2019, DePalma published for the first time on Tanis, in the journal PNAS. This paper, which made the case that Tanis records a brief time after the asteroid hit but did not reference the specific fossils mentioned earlier, was greeted skeptically, though both Jan Smit and Walter Alvarez were co-authors. “I’m not a great geologist,” Woodruff told me, “but Ray Charles could see the geology didn’t make sense the way they described it.” “No one I’ve talked to who’s not involved in the project,” says University of Alabama geologist Tom Tobin, “was convinced by that first paper.”

Those who buy into Tanis tend to focus on the considerable authority of Smit and Alvarez, giants in the field who stand by DePalma’s claims. Smit says he has seen the Tanis spherules, right there in the dirt, and the dinosaur feather in person. But DePalma’s reputation is such that even this does not settle the question. “You can buy spherules at the Tucson mineral show,” one paleontologist told me.

The person capable of making the best case for Tanis is neither Smit nor Alvarez but someone who has accused DePalma, publicly, of faking data. “I will admit,” Woodruff says, “I didn’t think in my professional opinion that any of Tanis was legitimate.” And yet Woodruff is less sure today because he trusts Melanie During, whose work stands, ironically, as the site’s best defense. In During’s synchrotron scan, her fish head appears to have, lodged in the gills, Nerds-like objects.

“How the hell do you plant them in a fish?” says Woodruff. “Like, I don’t think that can really happen. Melanie’s stuff is the only time that I’ve been like What if? and Huh! ”

DePalma has been working Tanis since 2012, talking about seasonality since at least 2013, and first encountered the concept of using histology to determine the season of the asteroid in conversation with paleobiologist Gregory Erickson in 2016. When During visited a year later, DePalma says he provided her with orientation materials that read “The Fall of the Cretaceous: Month Scale Timing of the Cretaceous Apocalypse,” predicted a “late spring to late summer” mass death, and mentioned “histological and isotopic results,” though it had equal emphasis on locating the flora that died at the same time. DePalma requires an “application” for visiting Tanis, which he says is typical but a number of other paleontologists say they have never before encountered. On her application, During indicated she would be investigating the fish’s various injuries, a fact DePalma noted when he expressed surprise that her thesis, which she sent him only after it was completed, was fully oriented toward pinpointing the season at spring.

“After reading your whole email, I can imagine you’re upset!” wrote Smit in response to DePalma. “Apologies for that, but to tell you the truth, we (Melanie’s supervisors) were also surprised by her last moment change of title. She clearly was carried away with the possibilities of the scans she made!”

In DePalma’s view and that of his colleagues, she had lied about her intentions, come to his site at his invitation, stayed in his tent, investigated fish that he packed up and sent her, concealed the subject of her thesis, and stolen his idea. This was outrageous to him, but it was something he could tolerate so long as the results were confined to an unpublished thesis. That she would publish them as first author was intolerable. “It was his idea,” says Pete Larson, the president of the Black Hills Institute and a co-author on DePalma’s paper. “It wasn’t her idea. That’s the thing that really kind of irks me — she did not come up with that idea on her own.”

Smit knew finding asteroid seasonality was DePalma’s plan, but he also knew the histological isotopic techniques had been developed, through trial and error, by During and others in the lab at Amsterdam. He suggested they write two separate papers and merge them into one. DePalma said he would send his manuscript; it was, he said, almost ready. It never, according to Smit, arrived. DePalma maintains that During never accepted the idea of merged manuscripts.

“Maybe I didn’t want to work with someone who accused me of theft,” During says to this. She concedes that the idea was DePalma’s. In her telling, it was he who suggested she search out the season of the asteroid in the ancient bones, and he was supportive of her work until he suddenly became hostile. Robert told her to “fill in whatever” on the application, she says, so she gestured generally toward her research interests.

In 2019 During applied for jobs and received a string of rejections. Eventually she found a role with Per Ahlberg at Uppsala University in Sweden. Ahlberg hired her, in part, because he thought she had been badly treated. He thought she deserved a break.

DePalma was a threat to During’s reputation, disastrous on a job market with many Ph.D.’s and few jobs, and by 2020 this was a massive source of stress. When she discovered that she was pregnant, she and her partner decided that she should step away from the issue of the unpublished Tanis research. She sewed a felt dinosaur mobile for the son she would soon have. She painted three marine reptiles underwater. She painted a long-necked dinosaur cradling a baby and a T. rex in the sun. Along with all the dinosaurs, she painted exactly one rocket ship. (“He doesn’t have to be a paleontologist,” she told me.) In between being induced and giving birth, she painted three more paintings of birds. The baby would be named Odin, an anagram of dino.

In 2021, Ahlberg encouraged During to submit the paper for publication despite the friction with DePalma. She emailed him to ask whether he wanted to be listed as an author, and weeks later, when he still had not responded, deleted his name.

“She waited for two years before she published anything,” Smit says. “I mean, two years is a long time in a scientist’s life.”

When he heard During was about to publish, a co-author of his told me, DePalma began to rush. His own paper would try to prove the asteroid-in-spring hypothesis through a number of separate overlapping methods, including showing what flora were found in the area, so as to leave little room for criticism.

During was 32 when, six months later, she read the email granting her paper a preliminary acceptance in Nature. Her master’s thesis — not even Ph.D. work — would be published in the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. It was too much to lose. She thought, Something will go wrong. It will never happen. Instead of celebrating, she focused on cleaning her house; her sister, terribly allergic to dust, was coming for a visit.

Two days later, as she was finishing up work, late to pick up her son from day care and her sister from the airport, her phone lit up with a text from Smit. “I should not have clicked the link,” she says, but she did click the link. DePalma had published his paper in the journal Scientific Reports. He was first. He was Alvarez; she was Smit. She drove through a blizzard with her son in the back of the car, working hard to see the road. Okay, she thought. I’m not going to publish. She ran out of wiper fluid, and the wipers could not keep up with the slush. He scooped me. It’s done.

As a child, Robert was, he says, “absolutely mercilessly bullied.” He spent a lot of time at home, though that entailed dealing with his parents’ divorce and custody battles. Alone in his room, he constructed hobby-store dioramas and small models of long-extinct beings. He adored cuckoo clocks; either he would be a cuckoo-clock-maker, he reasoned, or a paleontologist. Something in his body was conversant with matter, with bones. His father, an endodontist, operated on teeth for a living. His great-uncle, an orthopedic surgeon, wrote books with titles such as Diseases of the Knee. Robert did not care for sports, and the other children evidently did not care for clockwork. “I did not get a moment of peace from them,” he says. “I couldn’t even eat lunch.” He was born and raised in Florida, a barely surfaced peninsula in which not a single dinosaur fossil has ever been found.

In early adolescence, Robert found his first close friend, a boy named Terry he’d met outside. Terry was overweight, had also been excluded by other children, and adored microfossils — the little stuff, according to Robert, “that people usually don’t pay any attention to.” The boys volunteered as assistants at a local archaeology museum together. On school breaks, they left Florida for places with climates more given to preservation. They dug fossils in Wyoming and found trail ruts made a century back by Conestoga wagons. In 2004, when Robert was 22, they undertook a dig in South Dakota, unearthing a collection of plant and dinosaur fossils. They were thrilled. While they were at U-Haul getting a trailer on which to load all their new finds, Terry collapsed. Robert called an ambulance and Terry disappeared into the hospital. “A lady came in, and I thought she was going to say, ‘All right, he’s in rough shape, but you can see him in a couple hours.’ She said he was gone.”

There had been a heart condition. “No one had any goddamn idea,” says DePalma, apologizing for his tears. “All of the wonderful stuff that had gone on for both of us was just gone in an instant. It’s like the world disappears for you.”

After long days together looking at the remnants of other creatures, the boys had talked about what to do with their own bodies when they passed. Robert made a mold from the remains of a duck-billed dinosaur, the last dinosaur remnant Terry ever found, mixed his ashes with resin, and encased them in the shape of the fossil.

He found comfort in the field. “There are so many spots where you don’t see anything manmade at all,” he tells me. “And when you’re there, especially without a phone signal, despite the fact that you’re wearing something modern, you look around and you can literally feel like you are in that time period. I would be back there in a heartbeat.”

In July, I met DePalma in Bowman, North Dakota, and joined him on the short drive to Tanis. He had come all the way from Boca Raton for a single day to help a boyish graduate student in need of soil samples for a thesis. He was wearing a leather hat, thick suspenders, and a red backpack that once belonged to Terry. A long scar he didn’t want to talk about ran through his right eyebrow and continued under his eye. Every time someone asks about the scar, he gives a different story. Aliens, he’ll say. A Kraken.

“I’m not used to all this technology,” he said, messing with the dated screen on the rental-car console as mourning doves rose up from the grass. We passed grazing buffalo, horses, cows: “Cows when they’re born are so flippin’ cute.” Prairie chickens hopped along a fence. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to drive a wagon out here,” he said, clearly imagining it. He pointed out distant hills, turned orange by ancient fire. His thoughts flickered in and out of the present.

“Living history,” DePalma told me once, “is definitely one of my passions.” So is “flint napping,” which involves carving flint into stone tools. Robert’s comfort with matter — his facility with rocks and models — does not extend to strings of electrons beneath the threshold of visibility. “I avoided computers for a long time,” he told me, “and most of the first drafts of my papers were on pen and paper.” Still, he loves the lab and is perfectly comfortable at the synchrotron. “I’m like Alan Grant from Jurassic Park, ” he says, “struggling with the seat belt in the helicopter.”

At a lonely white church guarded by a filthy sheepdog, we met up with Erickson, the paleobiologist who first came up with the idea During allegedly stole, and two graduate students. Pete Larson, DePalma’s co-author from the Black Hills Institute, followed in his own truck as we drove onto the ranch.

“Is this a road?” I asked as we pulled onto the grass and our bodies pitched back and forth in the truck.

“This is a good road,” said Erickson.

We followed a fence line. In the soft breeze of a summer day it was easy to follow the story DePalma told: The grass, rippling in the wind, had once been a river, and this pile of gnarled stone the bank on which the river deposited its dead. Rocked by the asteroid, the rivers would have flooded and the fish pitched onto higher ground. Moments after we arrived, DePalma was already inside the place, leaning against the hill with a brush in one hand and a trowel in the other, carving through sediment as he explained dip angles and bedding traces to the students. In the ashen rock, a fish fossil appears rust red, a subtle change in color and texture barely visible to the layperson. “Oh, check it out,” he said. “There’s another fish coming out right there. Right there. And right here, too. That’s the skull of a sturgeon right there. Hey Greg, we got more fish right there.”

“We can’t decide if that’s the start of a footprint or not,” he said, gesturing at what may have been an herbivorous-dinosaur imprint but I would have thought a perfectly ordinary rock, “but we do find footprints in this horizon. It could be. I mean, that’s definitely soft-sediment deformation.”

He worked away some land and unveiled, across the black soil, a white line. “The boundary,” he said, full of asteroid, a weirdly literal transition between the age of dinosaurs and that of mammals. Later he would take a sample out of his pocket, tip dirt onto a microscope, and show me Nerds-like objects he says he gathered from the site. “Melted Yucatán,” he said, “airmailed from Mexico.”

It became clear during our time together that DePalma is beloved in Bowman; a husky-voiced, cigarette-slim worker -stocking shelves at the gas-station convenience store hugged him the moment we walked in (“A fascinating woman,” he called her), and the mohawked, lip-ringed chef who ran one of the only two restaurants open in town on Monday nights did the same. There is a kind of innocent charisma. DePalma is cordial, formal, quaint, an elder millennial clean of our generation’s collective linguistic tics. “Gosh,” he is given to say. “Son of a gun!” He is earnest in a way that engenders a watchful instinct in others.

“He has a history of getting burned by misplacing his trust,” says Liam O’Meallie, a claims adjuster who often accompanies DePalma on digs. “I’ve been protecting him from behind the scenes for a long time.”

When I ask him to tell me the true story of the scar, DePalma hesitates and gives in. It was a car accident. There had been a pileup in another lane. “It was happening so quickly,” he says, “and I crane my head around idiotically, thinking, Oh, I wonder what the hell is going on over there? Let’s have a look! ” A piece of debris flew into his open window, “smacks me right in the face, destroys that side of my glasses.” He drove home using the one eye not covered in blood.

He did not go to the doctor. “I didn’t want to do insurance,” he says, “I didn’t want to go through cops, I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to deal with bureaucracy, screwing around with all the powers that be, the paperwork.” Cops, insurance, a hospital: all the annoying frictions, the tedious conflicts inherent in the time in which Robert actually lives. They struck him as so stressful and time-consuming as to be intolerable. Instead of stitches, then, there would be only Band-Aids and a scar people will ask him about for the rest of his life.

“I wanted,” he says, “to be left alone.”

Academic publishing is not an ideal realm in which to hide from minor conflict. DePalma’s paper had problems During could see as soon as she took the time to look. Some were immediately obvious to those who skimmed it: The isotopes were off. 18C, an isotope that does not exist, is mentioned multiple times. “Even if it’s just a typo,” says Tobin, the Alabama geologist, “it’s a typo that’s consistent throughout in a way that makes you think, Does anyone on this paper know about isotopes?  ”

Others were less obvious and more concerning. During wondered where he had done this analysis; it is hard to acquire these tools. What mass spectrometer had he used? Why were the graphs so perfect, so seesaw in their uniformity? The figures seemed inconsistent with real-world results, or at least results produced with a computer. Some data points were listed twice. It looked to her as if the fish had eaten exactly the same amount every year.

Nature did not, in fact, retract During’s preliminary acceptance, and her paper came out that February. Her paper cited DePalma’s work nine times; it was built on his claims about Tanis, centered on specimens he had sent her, and ultimately rested on his integrity, which she would spend the next several years attacking.

During wrote to Scientific Reports with her concerns about DePalma’s paper, and on Christmas Eve 2021 DePalma received a disturbing email from the journal asking, among other things, about the isotope data. He was “gutted, full of anxiety,” his holiday ruined. Scientific Reports wanted to know the provenance of the raw data, but he did not have it because the person who had handled the data, Curtis McKinney, had died in 2017 before During even got to Tanis. McKinney worked at Miami Dade College. The college did not have a mass spectrometer, so McKinney would have had to do the analysis somewhere else. No one, including DePalma, could say where that was.

No one who knew McKinney seemed to remember him working on such a project. From a certain distance, it could look very much like DePalma had simply found a dead man to whom to attribute work never done. Even his defenders would find the lack of a paper trail a problem. After asking Scientific Reports for more information about the data used in the paper and making no progress in a year’s time, During and Ahlberg were done waiting. They took the extraordinary step of making public a technical 25-page response that was also an accusation. “We are compelled to ask,” they wrote, “whether the data may be fabricated, created to fit an already known conclusion.” (“It was way too personal for my taste,” says Smit. “It was not an objective scientific statement.”) The accusation was covered by Science magazine. In a response to Science, DePalma said the graphs were a bit off because he had plotted them, extraordinarily, by hand. It seemed to him that he was being attacked from all sides. He lost weight. He lost sleep. He was reminded, he tells me, of being bullied as a child.

During and Ahlberg formally complained to the University of Manchester, where DePalma had transferred, alleging misconduct. DePalma formally complained to Uppsala University, where During was a graduate student, alleging plagiarism. “Robert DePalma created these ideas and methods, and … over a period of years Melanie During progressively claimed these ideas for herself, culminating now in these false and shameless accusations against Robert DePalma,” wrote Professor Roy Wogelius in an internal statement to the University of Manchester. “I have been a professional scientist for 40 years and I have never encountered such an unwarranted, unhinged, and hypocritical attack on a colleague.”

“I think she treated Robert very badly,” Larson tells me, “and she, in doing so, probably ruined her own career, which is super-sad for me because she’s a bright young lady.”

DePalma was scheduled to give a talk at TEDx Boca Raton, but he postponed. During gave a talk at TEDx Stockholm. “I knew it was my responsibility to blow the whistle,” she told the crowd. “And why is it important to stand up for science? Because science denial is rampant. Being a researcher means more than doing research … it also takes the backbone to call out misconduct when you see it.”

To his university, now compelled to investigate its own student, DePalma provided copies of the materials he says he gave to During in 2017 when she arrived at Tanis. (She denies having received them.) A page of those materials mentioned “work from Curtis,” strong evidence that McKinney had not been summoned to operate a mass spectrometer from beyond the grave, though to this day no one knows where that analysis took place.

Robert DePalma is, in 2024, 43 years old and still a graduate student, despite having been handed what may or may not be the most spectacular paleontological site in the country. He is by many accounts a brilliant geologist. A student of his I spoke to described him as an extraordinary teacher. But he is not academic. He struggles with parts of paleontology that do not belong in a living-history segment. He does not enjoy publishing; he sees forward to the possibility of criticism. “The dread is, Oh God, then there’s going to be jealous people, ” he says. “There’s going to be people kicking you in the tail over it.” DePalma’s master’s thesis is, according to Smit, unreadable.

In our time in the field, DePalma would almost never mention, without prompting, the world of academic paleontology. He talked about how cool it would be to 3-D print a fossil. He talked about making a film, maybe anime, maybe CGI, from the perspective of an animal that died when the asteroid struck. He showed me a delicate, in-process reconstruction of a rattlesnake. Once in grad school, he had gone to enormous lengths to reconstruct a model of a lungfish in its burrow. “Why did you do this?” he recalls a professor asking him. “Are you studying this? Is this for a paper?”

“I told him time and again,” Smit says, “‘You lay your claims by going to a conference, give a talk, give an abstract.’ And apparently he thought, No, no, no. Then I’m giving away the science. And I couldn’t convince him of the contrary. It’s an imaginary problem for him, so he kept silent about it for a long time. He kept silent about the feathers. He kept silent about the discoveries. And now with Melanie, it sort of overtakes him. I mean, you cannot keep silent for eight years and then not publish anything. That’s not what you do in the modern world. That’s why I say he is a Romantic from the 19th century, but not in a modern, highly competitive field of science. And Melanie is quite the opposite.”

Tanis is so low, DePalma says, because it was part of a river that sliced deep into the land. If Tanis were part of a waterway, that waterway would once have continued onward, and one might therefore find other sites along the ghost of the river packed with petrified carcasses, showered in spherules. In 2023, During and Clint Boyd, a senior paleontologist at the North Dakota Geological Survey, parked a truck next to the ranch where Tanis is located and where Robert was then excavating. They would hike on public land to a Tanis-adjacent spot, also on public land, that During had a feeling about. The hike was hard, over grassy knolls and soft buttes that crumbled under their feet, in part because it was so important to stay on the section line, which was public, though that stretch of land was not always easiest to traverse. They kept checking Boyd’s phone to make sure they weren’t wandering onto someone’s property, until the phone was close to dead. Two hours later, they arrived. Melanie could see the three horns of a triceratops skull sticking out of the side of a hill. They felt more certain this was a solid spot, but it was late in the afternoon and they had a two-hour walk back. They decided to return the next day.

When they were almost back to the truck, a sedan approached. A woman rolled down the passenger-side window. “Better not go in Robert’s section,” she said. It was the woman who helped run the ranch, who had forced out Rob Sula long ago.

From the sedan, the woman gestured behind her.

“I don’t know what those guys want,” she said.

Next to Boyd’s truck were now two pickups and two men. One yelled at them for “trespassing,” spewing a string of expletives; the other paced back and forth to his truck. During was worried about what was in the truck. She hid behind Boyd, whose response to all the yelling was to calmly explain, with an interest that bordered on passion, the complicated rules of North Dakota backcountry private-public byways.

The younger guy got closer to Boyd’s face, waved his arms in protest. Boyd said they would leave.

“You can leave,” he said, “and we are going to watch you leave.”

The men watched them leave. Boyd did not think it was a good idea to go back to the spot on that trip. During flew home.

In December, the University of Manchester’s investigation finally concluded that its doctoral student Robert DePalma had not fabricated data and was probably already working on seasonality before During showed up. The university did say he was guilty of “poor research practice” regarding the mysterious origins of the isotope data. In May, Uppsala University concluded that its doctoral student Melanie During was not guilty of plagiarism, unfair representations of authorship, or deviations from good research practice.

“It has been one of the most hurtful and unexpected and discouraging situations of my life,” DePalma says when pressed about his state of mind, years after all of this started. “It has changed my views of optimism about how people will operate. I’m studying the impact that ended the world for so many different species. And it’s almost ironic that that’s the project that destroyed my soul.”

In June of this year, During returned to North Dakota, searching for a new Tanis. She and Boyd hiked against relentless wind, back toward the hill where she had seen the triceratops skull. It was loud and endless; by the end of an hour and a half of hiking, During’s sunglasses were scratched from flying debris. They gathered gallons of dirt from different sections of the hill and hiked back. Later, sifting through the debris back at the lab, watching it crumble through her fingers, During would find no clear evidence of spherules. But the trip had other pleasures. The wind had blown a salamander vertebrate right out of her palm. They’d found a crocodilian jaw with a tooth in it, just lying there on the surface, the spaces where other teeth had been as straight and uniform as a Battleship grid. They’d found three triceratops (“the cows of the Cretaceous,” During calls them), and Boyd had yanked a Chasmosaurus humerus straight out of a hill. They had found two sets of Thescelosaurus vertebrae. Thescelosaurus, long, heavy bipedal dinosaurs, appeared at the very end of the Late Cretaceous, just before the asteroid that would kill them off.

After the asteroid, surviving birds would carry on the genetic legacy of giant reptiles and the continent would enter the strange age of mammals. There would be a superfast 12-foot-tall bear and a muscular, strong-jawed giant pig. There would be a dog-size horse and beavers six feet long. Camels would evolve right here on the plains, and American lions bigger than African ones. The species that took it upon itself to figure it all out, to make a story of the past, would largely overlook these creatures in favor of T. rex and triceratops. The species would construct elaborate rules that govern who may and may not tread on particular pieces of land. It would evolve a complex economy of prestige to accompany the discovery of truths about all that had come before — a shadowy interplay of gatekeeping, mentorship, and recognition. There would be reason for everyone, on every side of a small discovery of a single fact, to feel overlooked and underappreciated, awake to the vastness of time and vulnerable to the smallest slight.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated that the Field Museum is part of the University of Chicago.

• hard paywall
• newsletter pick
• social studies
• environment
• new york magazine
• one great story
• audio article

Most Viewed Stories

• J.D. Vance Blames Staff for Disastrous Doughnut-Shop Visit
• What Trump Said in His Vulgar and Unhinged Truth Social Spree
• The Bitter Feud at the Heart of the Paleontology World  
• What We Know About the Trump Campaign’s Arlington National Cemetery Incident
• Donald Trump’s Misogyny Is About Power

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

• J.D. Vance Blames Staff for Disastrous Doughnut-Shop Visit By Margaret Hartmann
• What Trump Said in His Vulgar and Unhinged Truth Social Spree By Margaret Hartmann
• The Bitter Feud at the Heart of the Paleontology World   By Kerry Howley
• What We Know About the Trump Campaign’s Arlington National Cemetery Incident By Nia Prater
• Donald Trump’s Misogyny Is About Power By Sarah Jones

What is your email?

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.