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Conducting Research Projects Guide: Choosing a research question

Guidance is provided to students engaging in empirical research projects for internships and post-graduate study

Choosing a research question

Once you have a broad topic in mind, you need to formulate a specific question or hypothesis that you can test in your research project.

Your research question is a clear statement about, but not limited to:

  • an area of concern
  • a condition to be improved upon
  • a difficulty to be eliminated
  • a known problem in your field that needs further investigation
  • a new theory or framework you want to develop.

"If you don't know what you want to know, you will not be in a position to know how to find it out" (O'Leary, 2021, p. 42).

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What the research question does

The research question:

  • defines the topic
  • sets boundaries for the research project 
  • provides direction for the project.

The research question achieves this by:

Defining:

  1. the topic
  2. the nature of the research - to discover, explore, explain something about the topic
  3. the how, what, where, when, when
  4. the constructs and variables - e.g. income, age, education, gender...
  5. indication of relationship between variables that you expect to see - e.g.  impact, increases, decreases...

 

Setting boundaries that allow you to question throughout your research process whether the tangents you find have:

        a) very little relevance to the question

        b) quite relevant to the question

        c) not relevant at all but may be what you want to know, so you may choose to                     change your research question.

 

Provide direction by highlighting:

         i) the theory you need to explore

         ii) the literature you need to read

         iii) the data you need to collect

         iv) the methodology you need to use

 

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Developing your research question

Step One: 

Note down:

  • your topic
  • context of your research
  • what you want to achieve
  • the nature of your question - is it a what, who, where, how, when or why question?
  • any potential relationships you want to explore

Step Two:

Start with the nature of the question (who, what...).

Step Three:

Put together the information from your answers in Step One into a clear, researchable topic.

(O'Leary, 2021, p. 42).

 

NOTE: Your research question is not static. You may need to rework your research question multiple times before you decide on the version you start your research on.  During the research project, you may need to refine the question further as you find out more about your topic.

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