developing a research question from a claim

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Formulation of Research Question – Stepwise Approach

Simmi k. ratan.

Department of Pediatric Surgery, Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi, India

1 Department of Community Medicine, North Delhi Municipal Corporation Medical College, New Delhi, India

2 Department of Pediatric Surgery, Batra Hospital and Research Centre, New Delhi, India

Formulation of research question (RQ) is an essentiality before starting any research. It aims to explore an existing uncertainty in an area of concern and points to a need for deliberate investigation. It is, therefore, pertinent to formulate a good RQ. The present paper aims to discuss the process of formulation of RQ with stepwise approach. The characteristics of good RQ are expressed by acronym “FINERMAPS” expanded as feasible, interesting, novel, ethical, relevant, manageable, appropriate, potential value, publishability, and systematic. A RQ can address different formats depending on the aspect to be evaluated. Based on this, there can be different types of RQ such as based on the existence of the phenomenon, description and classification, composition, relationship, comparative, and causality. To develop a RQ, one needs to begin by identifying the subject of interest and then do preliminary research on that subject. The researcher then defines what still needs to be known in that particular subject and assesses the implied questions. After narrowing the focus and scope of the research subject, researcher frames a RQ and then evaluates it. Thus, conception to formulation of RQ is very systematic process and has to be performed meticulously as research guided by such question can have wider impact in the field of social and health research by leading to formulation of policies for the benefit of larger population.

I NTRODUCTION

A good research question (RQ) forms backbone of a good research, which in turn is vital in unraveling mysteries of nature and giving insight into a problem.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] RQ identifies the problem to be studied and guides to the methodology. It leads to building up of an appropriate hypothesis (Hs). Hence, RQ aims to explore an existing uncertainty in an area of concern and points to a need for deliberate investigation. A good RQ helps support a focused arguable thesis and construction of a logical argument. Hence, formulation of a good RQ is undoubtedly one of the first critical steps in the research process, especially in the field of social and health research, where the systematic generation of knowledge that can be used to promote, restore, maintain, and/or protect health of individuals and populations.[ 1 , 3 , 4 ] Basically, the research can be classified as action, applied, basic, clinical, empirical, administrative, theoretical, or qualitative or quantitative research, depending on its purpose.[ 2 ]

Research plays an important role in developing clinical practices and instituting new health policies. Hence, there is a need for a logical scientific approach as research has an important goal of generating new claims.[ 1 ]

C HARACTERISTICS OF G OOD R ESEARCH Q UESTION

“The most successful research topics are narrowly focused and carefully defined but are important parts of a broad-ranging, complex problem.”

A good RQ is an asset as it:

• Details the problem statement
• Further describes and refines the issue under study
• Adds focus to the problem statement
• Guides data collection and analysis
• Sets context of research.

Hence, while writing RQ, it is important to see if it is relevant to the existing time frame and conditions. For example, the impact of “odd-even” vehicle formula in decreasing the level of air particulate pollution in various districts of Delhi.

A good research is represented by acronym FINERMAPS[ 5 ]

Interesting.

• Appropriate
• Potential value and publishability
• Systematic.

Feasibility means that it is within the ability of the investigator to carry out. It should be backed by an appropriate number of subjects and methodology as well as time and funds to reach the conclusions. One needs to be realistic about the scope and scale of the project. One has to have access to the people, gadgets, documents, statistics, etc. One should be able to relate the concepts of the RQ to the observations, phenomena, indicators, or variables that one can access. One should be clear that the collection of data and the proceedings of project can be completed within the limited time and resources available to the investigator. Sometimes, a RQ appears feasible, but when fieldwork or study gets started, it proves otherwise. In this situation, it is important to write up the problems honestly and to reflect on what has been learned. One should try to discuss with more experienced colleagues or the supervisor so as to develop a contingency plan to anticipate possible problems while working on a RQ and find possible solutions in such situations.

This is essential that one has a real grounded interest in one's RQ and one can explore this and back it up with academic and intellectual debate. This interest will motivate one to keep going with RQ.

The question should not simply copy questions investigated by other workers but should have scope to be investigated. It may aim at confirming or refuting the already established findings, establish new facts, or find new aspects of the established facts. It should show imagination of the researcher. Above all, the question has to be simple and clear. The complexity of a question can frequently hide unclear thoughts and lead to a confused research process. A very elaborate RQ, or a question which is not differentiated into different parts, may hide concepts that are contradictory or not relevant. This needs to be clear and thought-through. Having one key question with several subcomponents will guide your research.

This is the foremost requirement of any RQ and is mandatory to get clearance from appropriate authorities before stating research on the question. Further, the RQ should be such that it minimizes the risk of harm to the participants in the research, protect the privacy and maintain their confidentiality, and provide the participants right to withdraw from research. It should also guide in avoiding deceptive practices in research.

The question should of academic and intellectual interest to people in the field you have chosen to study. The question preferably should arise from issues raised in the current situation, literature, or in practice. It should establish a clear purpose for the research in relation to the chosen field. For example, filling a gap in knowledge, analyzing academic assumptions or professional practice, monitoring a development in practice, comparing different approaches, or testing theories within a specific population are some of the relevant RQs.

Manageable (M): It has the similar essence as of feasibility but mainly means that the following research can be managed by the researcher.

Appropriate (A): RQ should be appropriate logically and scientifically for the community and institution.

Potential value and publishability (P): The study can make significant health impact in clinical and community practices. Therefore, research should aim for significant economic impact to reduce unnecessary or excessive costs. Furthermore, the proposed study should exist within a clinical, consumer, or policy-making context that is amenable to evidence-based change. Above all, a good RQ must address a topic that has clear implications for resolving important dilemmas in health and health-care decisions made by one or more stakeholder groups.

Systematic (S): Research is structured with specified steps to be taken in a specified sequence in accordance with the well-defined set of rules though it does not rule out creative thinking.

Example of RQ: Would the topical skin application of oil as a skin barrier reduces hypothermia in preterm infants? This question fulfills the criteria of a good RQ, that is, feasible, interesting, novel, ethical, and relevant.

Types of research question

A RQ can address different formats depending on the aspect to be evaluated.[ 6 ] For example:

• Existence: This is designed to uphold the existence of a particular phenomenon or to rule out rival explanation, for example, can neonates perceive pain?
• Description and classification: This type of question encompasses statement of uniqueness, for example, what are characteristics and types of neuropathic bladders?
• Composition: It calls for breakdown of whole into components, for example, what are stages of reflux nephropathy?
• Relationship: Evaluate relation between variables, for example, association between tumor rupture and recurrence rates in Wilm's tumor
• Descriptive—comparative: Expected that researcher will ensure that all is same between groups except issue in question, for example, Are germ cell tumors occurring in gonads more aggressive than those occurring in extragonadal sites?
• Causality: Does deletion of p53 leads to worse outcome in patients with neuroblastoma?
• Causality—comparative: Such questions frequently aim to see effect of two rival treatments, for example, does adding surgical resection improves survival rate outcome in children with neuroblastoma than with chemotherapy alone?
• Causality–Comparative interactions: Does immunotherapy leads to better survival outcome in neuroblastoma Stage IV S than with chemotherapy in the setting of adverse genetic profile than without it? (Does X cause more changes in Y than those caused by Z under certain condition and not under other conditions).

How to develop a research question

• Begin by identifying a broader subject of interest that lends itself to investigate, for example, hormone levels among hypospadias
• Do preliminary research on the general topic to find out what research has already been done and what literature already exists.[ 7 ] Therefore, one should begin with “information gaps” (What do you already know about the problem? For example, studies with results on testosterone levels among hypospadias
• What do you still need to know? (e.g., levels of other reproductive hormones among hypospadias)
• What are the implied questions: The need to know about a problem will lead to few implied questions. Each general question should lead to more specific questions (e.g., how hormone levels differ among isolated hypospadias with respect to that in normal population)
• Narrow the scope and focus of research (e.g., assessment of reproductive hormone levels among isolated hypospadias and hypospadias those with associated anomalies)
• Is RQ clear? With so much research available on any given topic, RQs must be as clear as possible in order to be effective in helping the writer direct his or her research
• Is the RQ focused? RQs must be specific enough to be well covered in the space available
• Is the RQ complex? RQs should not be answerable with a simple “yes” or “no” or by easily found facts. They should, instead, require both research and analysis on the part of the writer
• Is the RQ one that is of interest to the researcher and potentially useful to others? Is it a new issue or problem that needs to be solved or is it attempting to shed light on previously researched topic
• Is the RQ researchable? Consider the available time frame and the required resources. Is the methodology to conduct the research feasible?
• Is the RQ measurable and will the process produce data that can be supported or contradicted?
• Is the RQ too broad or too narrow?
• Create Hs: After formulating RQ, think where research is likely to be progressing? What kind of argument is likely to be made/supported? What would it mean if the research disputed the planned argument? At this step, one can well be on the way to have a focus for the research and construction of a thesis. Hs consists of more specific predictions about the nature and direction of the relationship between two variables. It is a predictive statement about the outcome of the research, dictate the method, and design of the research[ 1 ]
• Understand implications of your research: This is important for application: whether one achieves to fill gap in knowledge and how the results of the research have practical implications, for example, to develop health policies or improve educational policies.[ 1 , 8 ]

Brainstorm/Concept map for formulating research question

• First, identify what types of studies have been done in the past?
• Is there a unique area that is yet to be investigated or is there a particular question that may be worth replicating?
• Begin to narrow the topic by asking open-ended “how” and “why” questions
• Evaluate the question
• Develop a Hypothesis (Hs)
• Write down the RQ.

Writing down the research question

• State the question in your own words
• Write down the RQ as completely as possible.

For example, Evaluation of reproductive hormonal profile in children presenting with isolated hypospadias)

• Divide your question into concepts. Narrow to two or three concepts (reproductive hormonal profile, isolated hypospadias, compare with normal/not isolated hypospadias–implied)
• Specify the population to be studied (children with isolated hypospadias)
• Refer to the exposure or intervention to be investigated, if any
• Reflect the outcome of interest (hormonal profile).

Another example of a research question

Would the topical skin application of oil as a skin barrier reduces hypothermia in preterm infants? Apart from fulfilling the criteria of a good RQ, that is, feasible, interesting, novel, ethical, and relevant, it also details about the intervention done (topical skin application of oil), rationale of intervention (as a skin barrier), population to be studied (preterm infants), and outcome (reduces hypothermia).

Other important points to be heeded to while framing research question

• Make reference to a population when a relationship is expected among a certain type of subjects
• RQs and Hs should be made as specific as possible
• Avoid words or terms that do not add to the meaning of RQs and Hs
• Stick to what will be studied, not implications
• Name the variables in the order in which they occur/will be measured
• Avoid the words significant/”prove”
• Avoid using two different terms to refer to the same variable.

Some of the other problems and their possible solutions have been discussed in Table 1 .

Potential problems and solutions while making research question

G OING B EYOND F ORMULATION OF R ESEARCH Q UESTION–THE P ATH A HEAD

Once RQ is formulated, a Hs can be developed. Hs means transformation of a RQ into an operational analog.[ 1 ] It means a statement as to what prediction one makes about the phenomenon to be examined.[ 4 ] More often, for case–control trial, null Hs is generated which is later accepted or refuted.

A strong Hs should have following characteristics:

• Give insight into a RQ
• Are testable and measurable by the proposed experiments
• Have logical basis
• Follows the most likely outcome, not the exceptional outcome.

E XAMPLES OF R ESEARCH Q UESTION AND H YPOTHESIS

Research question-1.

• Does reduced gap between the two segments of the esophagus in patients of esophageal atresia reduces the mortality and morbidity of such patients?

Hypothesis-1

• Reduced gap between the two segments of the esophagus in patients of esophageal atresia reduces the mortality and morbidity of such patients
• In pediatric patients with esophageal atresia, gap of <2 cm between two segments of the esophagus and proper mobilization of proximal pouch reduces the morbidity and mortality among such patients.

Research question-2

• Does application of mitomycin C improves the outcome in patient of corrosive esophageal strictures?

Hypothesis-2

In patients aged 2–9 years with corrosive esophageal strictures, 34 applications of mitomycin C in dosage of 0.4 mg/ml for 5 min over a period of 6 months improve the outcome in terms of symptomatic and radiological relief. Some other examples of good and bad RQs have been shown in Table 2 .

Examples of few bad (left-hand side column) and few good (right-hand side) research questions

R ESEARCH Q UESTION AND S TUDY D ESIGN

RQ determines study design, for example, the question aimed to find the incidence of a disease in population will lead to conducting a survey; to find risk factors for a disease will need case–control study or a cohort study. RQ may also culminate into clinical trial.[ 9 , 10 ] For example, effect of administration of folic acid tablet in the perinatal period in decreasing incidence of neural tube defect. Accordingly, Hs is framed.

Appropriate statistical calculations are instituted to generate sample size. The subject inclusion, exclusion criteria and time frame of research are carefully defined. The detailed subject information sheet and pro forma are carefully defined. Moreover, research is set off few examples of research methodology guided by RQ:

• Incidence of anorectal malformations among adolescent females (hospital-based survey)
• Risk factors for the development of spontaneous pneumoperitoneum in pediatric patients (case–control design and cohort study)
• Effect of technique of extramucosal ureteric reimplantation without the creation of submucosal tunnel for the preservation of upper tract in bladder exstrophy (clinical trial).

The results of the research are then be available for wider applications for health and social life

C ONCLUSION

A good RQ needs thorough literature search and deep insight into the specific area/problem to be investigated. A RQ has to be focused yet simple. Research guided by such question can have wider impact in the field of social and health research by leading to formulation of policies for the benefit of larger population.

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Conflicts of interest.

There are no conflicts of interest.

R EFERENCES

Research: From selecting a topic to writing the bibliography

• Selecting a Topic
• Developing a Research Question
• What Type of Source Do I Need?
• Selecting the Best Place to Search
• Search Like a Pro
• Evaluating Information

Research Questions Worth Asking

This video from the UMD, Global Campus gives a good introduction to research questions.

What is a research question?

Once you have selected a topic, you need to develop a research question. You may be used to working with a thesis statement, but a thesis statement is an answer. If you start your research with an answer, you might miss something important or your paper might be too one-sided. Starting with a question allows you to explore your topic while still having it clearly defined. 

A good research question is specific and focused.

Topic : Netflix

Research Question : How has the rise of streaming television changed the nature of advertising during television shows?

Topic : the environmental impact of fracking

Research Question : What are some of the most effective ways of protecting local ground water from the waste water produced by fracking?

Tip: Beware of research questions that are too broad or too narrow.

Too Broad:  Why is reality television so popular?

Too Narrow:  What are the economic and social consequences of the popularity of Jersey Shore on the lives of teenagers living in Omaha, Nebraska? 

Tip: be willing to tweak your research question as you go.

Research Question:  How has the rise of streaming television changed the nature of advertising during television shows?

Potential Research Finding:  Advertising during television hasn't changed much recently.

New Research Question:  Why has advertising on television been able to remain the same when how we watch television has changed so much?

Examples of Research Questions

The assignment is a 10-15 page paper relying primarily on scholarly resources.

• How is malaria treated?
• Will tablet computing replace the need for laptops?
• How much has the popularity of Harry Potter improved the reading scores of second graders in Missouri?
• At what point in time will the need for nurses in pedatric wards outpace the graduation rates from nursing schools?
• In what ways have online communities changed the nature of support systems available for people with Attention Deficit Disorder?
• How has mountaintop removal mining in western Kentucky impacted the migratory habits of the local bird population?
• << Previous: Selecting a Topic
• Next: What Type of Source Do I Need? >>
• Last Updated: Apr 12, 2024 9:57 AM
• URL: https://libguides.gwu.edu/research

Designing a Research Question

• First Online: 29 November 2023

Cite this chapter

• Ahmed Ibrahim 3 &
• Camille L. Bryant 3  

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This chapter discusses (1) the important role of research questions for descriptive, predictive, and causal studies across the three research paradigms (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods); (2) characteristics of quality research questions, and (3) three frameworks to support the development of research questions and their dissemination within scholarly work. For the latter, a description of the P opulation/ P articipants, I ntervention/ I ndependent variable, C omparison, and O utcomes (PICO) framework for quantitative research as well as variations depending on the type of research is provided. Second, we discuss the P articipants, central Ph enomenon, T ime, and S pace (PPhTS) framework for qualitative research. The combination of these frameworks is discussed for mixed-methods research. Further, templates and examples are provided to support the novice health scholar in developing research questions for applied and theoretical studies. Finally, we discuss the Create a Research Space (CARS) model for introducing research questions as part of a research study, to demonstrate how scholars can apply their knowledge when disseminating research.

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Ibrahim, A., Bryant, C.L. (2023). Designing a Research Question. In: Fitzgerald, A.S., Bosch, G. (eds) Education Scholarship in Healthcare. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38534-6_4

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• Developing a Research Question

by acburton | Mar 22, 2024 | Resources for Students , Writing Resources

Selecting your research question and creating a clear goal and structure for your writing can be challenging – whether you are doing it for the first time or if you’ve done it many times before. It can be especially difficult when your research question starts to look and feel a little different somewhere between your first and final draft. Don’t panic! It’s normal for your research question to change a little (or even quite a bit) as you move through and engage with the writing process. Anticipating this can remind you to stay on track while you work and that it’ll be okay even if the literature takes you in a different direction.

What Makes an Effective Research Question?

The most effective research question will usually be a critical thinking question and should use “how” or “why” to ensure it can move beyond a yes/no or one-word type of answer. Consider how your research question can aim to reveal something new, fill in a gap, even if small, and contribute to the field in a meaningful way; How might the proposed project move knowledge forward about a particular place or process? This should be specific and achievable!

The CEWC’s Grad Writing Consultant Tariq says, “I definitely concentrated on those aspects of what I saw in the field where I believed there was an opportunity to move the discipline forward.”

General Tips

Do your research.

Utilize the librarians at your university and take the time to research your topic first. Try looking at very general sources to get an idea of what could be interesting to you before you move to more academic articles that support your rough idea of the topic. It is important that research is grounded in what you see or experience regarding the topic you have chosen and what is already known in the literature. Spend time researching articles, books, etc. that supports your thesis. Once you have a number of sources that you know support what you want to write about, formulate a research question that serves as the interrogative form of your thesis statement.

Grad Writing Consultant Deni advises, “Delineate your intervention in the literature (i.e., be strategic about the literature you discuss and clear about your contributions to it).”

Start Broadly…. then Narrow Your Topic Down to Something Manageable

When brainstorming your research question, let your mind veer toward connections or associations that you might have already considered or that seem to make sense and consider if new research terms, language or concepts come to mind that may be interesting or exciting for you as a researcher. Sometimes testing out a research question while doing some preliminary researching is also useful to see if the language you are using or the direction you are heading toward is fruitful when trying to search strategically in academic databases. Be prepared to focus on a specific area of a broad topic.

Writing Consultant Jessie recommends outlining: “I think some rough outlining with a research question in mind can be helpful for me. I’ll have a research question and maybe a working thesis that I feel may be my claim to the research question based on some preliminary materials, brainstorming, etc.” — Jessie, CEWC Writing Consultant

Try an Exercise

In the earliest phase of brainstorming, try an exercise suggested by CEWC Writing Specialist, Percival! While it is normally used in classroom or workshop settings, this exercise can easily be modified for someone working alone. The flow of the activity, if done within a group setting, is 1) someone starts with an idea, 2) three other people share their idea, and 3) the starting person picks two of these new ideas they like best and combines their original idea with those. The activity then begins again with the idea that was not chosen. The solo version of this exercise substitutes a ‘word bank,’ created using words, topics, or ideas similar to your broad, overarching theme. Pick two words or phrases from your word bank, combine it with your original idea or topic, and ‘start again’ with two different words. This serves as a replacement for different people’s suggestions. Ideas for your ‘word bank’ can range from vague prompts about mapping or webbing (e.g., where your topic falls within the discipline and others like it), to more specific concepts that come from tracing the history of an idea (its past, present, future) or mapping the idea’s related ideas, influences, etc. Care for a physics analogy? There is a particle (your topic) that you can describe, a wave that the particle traces, and a field that the particle is mapped on.

Get Feedback and Affirm Your Confidence!

Creating a few different versions of your research question (they may be the same topic/issue/theme or differ slightly) can be useful during this process. Sharing these with trusted friends, colleagues, mentors, (or tutors!) and having conversations about your questions and ideas with other people can help you decide which version you may feel most confident or interested in. Ask colleagues and mentors to share their research questions with you to get a lot of examples. Once you have done the work of developing an effective research question, do not forget to affirm your confidence! Based on your working thesis, think about how you might organize your chapters or paragraphs and what resources you have for supporting this structure and organization. This can help boost your confidence that the research question you have created is effective and fruitful.

Be Open to Change

Remember, your research question may change from your first to final draft. For questions along the way, make an appointment with the Writing Center. We are here to help you develop an effective and engaging research question and build the foundation for a solid research paper!

Example 1: In my field developing a research question involves navigating the relationship between 1) what one sees/experiences at their field site and 2) what is already known in the literature. During my preliminary research, I found that the financial value of land was often a matter of precisely these cultural factors. So, my research question ended up being: How do the social and material qualities of land entangle with processes of financialization in the city of Lahore. Regarding point #1, this question was absolutely informed by what I saw in the field. But regarding point #2, the question was also heavily shaped by the literature. – Tariq

Example 2: A research question should not be a yes/no question like “Is pollution bad?”; but an open-ended question where the answer has to be supported with reasons and explanation. The question also has to be narrowed down to a specific topic—using the same example as before—”Is pollution bad?” can be revised to “How does pollution affect people?” I would encourage students to be more specific then; e.g., what area of pollution do you want to talk about: water, air, plastic, climate change… what type of people or demographic can we focus on? …how does this affect marginalized communities, minorities, or specific areas in California? After researching and deciding on a focus, your question might sound something like: How does government policy affect water pollution and how does it affect the marginalized communities in the state of California? -Janella

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VII. Researched Writing

7.1 Developing a Research Question

Emilie Zickel and Terri Pantuso

I write out of ignorance. I write about the things I don’t have any resolutions for, and when I’m finished, I think I know a little bit more about it. I don’t write out of what I know. It’s what I don’t know that stimulates me . I merely know enough to get started. —Toni Morrison [1]

Think of a research paper as an opportunity to deepen (or create) knowledge about a topic that matters to you. Just as Toni Morrison states that she is stimulated by what she doesn’t yet know, a research paper assignment can be interesting and meaningful if it allows you to explore what you don’t know.

Research, at its best, is an act of knowledge creation, not just an extended book report. This knowledge creation is the essence of any great educational experience. Instead of just listening to lectures, you get to design the learning project that will ultimately result in you experiencing, and then expressing, your own intellectual growth. You get to read what you choose, thereby becoming an expert on your topic.

That sounds, perhaps, like a lofty goal. But by spending some quality time brainstorming, reading, thinking or otherwise tuning into what matters to you, you can end up with a workable research topic that will lead you on an enjoyable research journey.

The best research topics are meaningful to you; therefore, you should:

• Choose a topic that you want to understand better;
• Choose a topic that you want to read about and devote time to;
• Choose a topic that is perhaps a bit out of your comfort zone;
• Choose a topic that allows you to understand others’ opinions and how those opinions are shaped;
• Choose something that is relevant to you, personally or professionally;
• Do not choose a topic because you think it will be “easy” – those can end up being quite challenging.

Brainstorming Ideas for a Research Topic

There are many ways to come up with a good topic. The best thing to do is to give yourself time to think about what you really want to commit days and weeks to reading, thinking, researching, more reading, writing, more researching, reading and writing on.

It can be difficult to come up with a topic from scratch, so consider looking at some information sources that can give you some ideas. Check out your favorite news sources or take a look at a library databases like CQ Researcher or Point of Review Reference Center.

As you browse through databases or news sources , ask yourself some of the following questions: Which question(s) below interest you? Which question(s) below spark a desire to respond? A good topic is one that moves you to think, to do, to want to know more, to want to say more. Here are some questions you might use in your search for topics:

• What news stories do you often see, but want to know more about?
• What (socio-political) argument do you often have with others that you would love to work on strengthening?
• What are the key controversies or current debates in the field of work that you want to go into?
• What is a problem that you see at work that needs to be better publicized or understood?
• What is the biggest issue facing [specific group of people: by age, by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by nationality, by geography, by economic standing? choose a group]
• What area/landmark/piece of history in your home community are you interested in?
• What local problem do you want to better understand?
• Is there some element of the career that you would like to have one day that you want to better understand?
• What would you love to become an expert on?
• What are you passionate about?

From Topic to Research Question

Once you have decided on a research topic, an area for academic exploration that matters to you, it is time to start thinking about what you want to learn about that topic.

The goal of college-level research assignments is never going to be to simply “go find sources” on your topic. Instead, think of sources as helping you to answer a research question or a series of research questions about your topic. These should not be simple questions with simple answers, but rather complex questions about which there is no easy or obvious answer.

A compelling research question is one that may involve controversy, or may have a variety of answers, or may not have any single, clear answer. All of that is okay and even desirable. If the answer is an easy and obvious one, then there is little need for argument or research.

Make sure that your research question is clear, specific, researchable and limited (but not too limited). Most of all, make sure that you are curious about your own research question. If it does not matter to you, researching it will feel incredibly boring and tedious.

This section contains material from:

Zickel, Emilie. “Developing a Research Question.” In A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing , by Melanie Gagich and Emilie Zickel. Cleveland: MSL Academic Endeavors. Accessed July 2019. https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/chapter/developing-a-research-question/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

• Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison,” in Black Women Writers at Work , ed. Claudia Tate (Continuum Publish Company, 1983), 130. ↵

A database is an organized collection of data in a digital format. Library research databases are often composed of academic publications like journal articles and book chapters, although there are also specialty databases that have data like engineering specifications or world news articles.

A news source is a story or article that runs in a journalism publication or outlet. News sources tend to be about current events, but there are also opinion pieces and investigative journalism pieces that may cover broader topics over a longer period of time.

7.1 Developing a Research Question Copyright © 2022 by Emilie Zickel and Terri Pantuso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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1.6: Developing Your Research Question

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 81166

• Cheryl Lowry
• The Ohio State University via Ohio State University Libraries

Developing Your Research Question

Because of all their influence, you might worry that research questions are very difficult to develop. Sometimes it can seem that way. But we’ll help you get the hang of it and, luckily, none of us has to come up with perfect ones right off. It’s more like doing a rough draft and then improving it. That’s why we talk about developing research questions instead of just writing them.

Steps for Developing a Research Question

The steps for developing a research question, listed below, can help you organize your thoughts.

Step 1: Pick a topic (or consider the one assigned to you).

Step 2: Write a narrower/smaller topic that is related to the first.

Step 3: List some potential questions that could logically be asked in relation to the narrow topic.

Step 4: Pick the question that you are most interested in.

Step 5: Change that question you’re interested in so that it is more focused.

MOVIE: Developing Research Questions

As you view this short video on how to develop research questions, think about the steps. Which step do you think is easiest? Which do you think is hardest?

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/?p=63

View Movie | View Text Version

Once you know the steps and their order, only three skills are involved in developing a research question:

• Imagining narrower topics about a larger one,
• Thinking of questions that stem from a narrow topic, and
• Focusing questions to eliminate their vagueness.

Every time you use these skills, it’s important to evaluate what you have produced—that’s just part of the process of turning rough drafts into more finished products.

Three steps for developing a research question

ACTIVITY: Developing a Research Question

Open activity in a web browser.

Maybe you have a topic in mind, but aren’t sure how to form a research question around it. The trick is to think of a question related to your topic, but not answerable with a quick search. Also, try to be specific so that your research question can be fully answered in the final product for your research assignment.

ACTIVITY: Thinking of Questions

For each of the narrow topics below, think of a research question that is logically related to that topic. (Remember that good research questions often, but not always, start with “Why” or “How” because questions that begin that way usually require more analysis.)

• U.S. investors’ attitudes about sustainability
• College students’ use of Snapchat
• The character Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
• Nature-inspired nanotechnologies
• Marital therapy

After you think of each research question, evaluate it by asking whether it is:

• Logically related to the topic
• In question form
• Not answerable with a quick Google search
• Specific, not vague

Sometimes the first draft of a research question is still too broad, which can make your search for sources more challenging. Refining your question to remove vagueness or to target a specific aspect of the topic can help.

ACTIVITY: Focusing Questions

The first draft research questions below are not focused enough. Read them and identify at least one area of vagueness in each. Check your vagueness with what we identified. It’s great if you found more than we did because that can lead to research questions of greater specificity. See the bottom of the page for the answers.

First Drafts of Research Questions:

• Why have most electric car company start-ups failed?
• How do crabapple trees develop buds?
• How has NASA helped America?
• Why do many first-time elections soon after a country overthrows a dictator result in very conservative elected leaders?
• How is music composed and performed mostly by African-Americans connected to African-American history?

Answer TO ACTIVITY: Focusing Questions

Some answers to the “Focusing Questions” Activity above are:

Question 1: Why have most electric car company start-ups failed? Vagueness: Which companies are we talking about? Worldwide or in a particular country?

Question 2: How do crabapple trees develop buds? Vagueness: There are several kinds of crabapples. Should we talk only about one kind? Does it matter where the crabapple tree lives?

Question 3: How has NASA helped America? Vagueness: NASA has had many projects. Should we should focus on one project they completed? Or projects during a particular time period?

Question 4: Why do many first-time elections soon after a country overthrows a dictator result in very conservative elected leaders? Vagueness: What time period are we talking about? Many dictators have been overthrown and many countries have been involved. Perhaps we should focus on one country or one dictator or one time period.

Question 5: How is music composed and performed mostly by African-Americans connected to African-American history? Vagueness: What kinds of music? Any particular performers and composers? When?

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

VII. Researched Writing

7.2 Developing a Research Question

Emilie Zickel and Terri Pantuso

I write out of ignorance. I write about the things I don’t have any resolutions for, and when I’m finished, I think I know a little bit more about it. I don’t write out of what I know. It’s what I don’t know that stimulates me . I merely know enough to get started. —Toni Morrison [1]

Think of a research paper as an opportunity to deepen (or create) knowledge about a topic that matters to you. Just as Toni Morrison states that she is stimulated by what she doesn’t yet know, a research paper assignment can be interesting and meaningful if it allows you to explore what you don’t know.

Research, at its best, is an act of knowledge creation, not just an extended book report. This knowledge creation is the essence of any great educational experience. Instead of just listening to lectures, you get to design the learning project that will ultimately result in you experiencing, and then expressing, your own intellectual growth. You get to read what you choose, thereby becoming an expert on your topic.

That sounds, perhaps, like a lofty goal. But by spending some quality time brainstorming, reading, thinking or otherwise tuning into what matters to you, you can end up with a workable research topic that will lead you on an enjoyable research journey.

The best research topics are meaningful to you; therefore, you should:

• Choose a topic that you want to understand better;
• Choose a topic that you want to read about and devote time to;
• Choose a topic that is perhaps a bit out of your comfort zone;
• Choose a topic that allows you to understand others’ opinions and how those opinions are shaped;
• Choose something that is relevant to you, personally or professionally;
• Do not choose a topic because you think it will be “easy” – those can end up being quite challenging.

Brainstorming Ideas for a Research Topic

There are many ways to come up with a good topic. The best thing to do is to give yourself time to think about what you really want to commit days and weeks to reading, thinking, researching, more reading, writing, more researching, reading and writing on.

It can be difficult to come up with a topic from scratch, so consider looking at some information sources that can give you some ideas. Check out your favorite news sources or take a look at a library databases like CQ Researcher or Point of Review Reference Center.

As you browse through databases or news sources , ask yourself some of the following questions: Which question(s) below interest you? Which question(s) below spark a desire to respond? A good topic is one that moves you to think, to do, to want to know more, to want to say more. Here are some questions you might use in your search for topics:

• What news stories do you often see, but want to know more about?
• What (socio-political) argument do you often have with others that you would love to work on strengthening?
• What are the key controversies or current debates in the field of work that you want to go into?
• What is a problem that you see at work that needs to be better publicized or understood?
• What is the biggest issue facing [specific group of people: by age, by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by nationality, by geography, by economic standing? choose a group]
• What area/landmark/piece of history in your home community are you interested in?
• What local problem do you want to better understand?
• Is there some element of the career that you would like to have one day that you want to better understand?
• What would you love to become an expert on?
• What are you passionate about?

From Topic to Research Question

Once you have decided on a research topic, an area for academic exploration that matters to you, it is time to start thinking about what you want to learn about that topic.

The goal of college-level research assignments is never going to be to simply “go find sources” on your topic. Instead, think of sources as helping you to answer a research question or a series of research questions about your topic. These should not be simple questions with simple answers, but rather complex questions about which there is no easy or obvious answer.

A compelling research question is one that may involve controversy, or may have a variety of answers, or may not have any single, clear answer. All of that is okay and even desirable. If the answer is an easy and obvious one, then there is little need for argument or research.

Make sure that your research question is clear, specific, researchable and limited (but not too limited). Most of all, make sure that you are curious about your own research question. If it does not matter to you, researching it will feel incredibly boring and tedious.

This section contains material from:

Zickel, Emilie. “Developing a Research Question.” In A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing , by Melanie Gagich and Emilie Zickel. Cleveland: MSL Academic Endeavors. Accessed July 2019. https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/chapter/developing-a-research-question/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . Archival link: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027000105/https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/chapter/developing-a-research-question/

• Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison,” in Black Women Writers at Work , ed. Claudia Tate (Continuum Publish Company, 1983), 130. ↵

A database is an organized collection of data in a digital format. Library research databases are often composed of academic publications like journal articles and book chapters, although there are also specialty databases that have data like engineering specifications or world news articles.

A news source is a story or article that runs in a journalism publication or outlet. News sources tend to be about current events, but there are also opinion pieces and investigative journalism pieces that may cover broader topics over a longer period of time.

7.2 Developing a Research Question Copyright © 2023 by Emilie Zickel and Terri Pantuso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Developing a Research Question

Choosing a topic, strategies for narrowing a topic, developing your research question.

• Research Help

You've chosen a research topic, and now you need to find resources about it. Before you get too far along, you will need to narrow down your topic into a research statement or question. The sooner you do this in your research process, the more time you'll save because you can conduct more focused searches.

How do I know if my topic is too broad?

Maybe you received feedback that your topic is too broad, or maybe you're having trouble finding relevant resources using your search keywords. Topics that are too broad are difficult to research. Your topic may be too broad if any of the following happens to you:

• You find too many information sources and it's difficult to determine what is important or relevant, making it hard to decide what to include or exclude.
• You find information that is too general, so it's difficult to develop a clear framework or argument for examining the topic.
• You do not have a clearly defined thesis statement that you can analyze.
• You find information that covers a wide variety of concepts or ideas that can't be integrated into one paper.
• Your outline or proposal seems like it is trailing off into unnecessary tangents.

Choosing a topic can be a difficult process when starting an assignment or writing a paper, and narrowing your topic is an important step in the research process. Here's one strategy for narrowing a broad topic:

Generate a list of more specific areas of interest (or subtopics) related to your overall topic.

For example:

If your topic is education , subtopics include:

• Online education
• Traditional education model
• Common Core
• STEM education

If your topic is crime , subtopics include:

• Juvenile crime
• Sentencing bias
• Criminal justice system
• Racial profiling
• Prison reform

If your topic is work , subtopics include:

• Employment and unemployment
• Wages, salaries and other earnings
• Job training and educational attainment
• Commuting to work
• Workplace organization, innovation, performance
• Job mobility and turnover

Think about Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How

Even if your professor assigns you a specific topic to study, you might still have to narrow it down a little. One way to reframe topics is by thinking about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Here are some common ways you can narrow down any research topic:

• disparities in online learning outcomes for low-income students
• racial differences in sentencing and bail-setting
• challenges faced by international college graduates entering the workforce
• webcam fatigue in online learning
• predictive algorithms in criminal sentencing
• workplace surveillance of employees
• remote learning in rural areas without high-speed internet
• rates of incarceration in the United States versus other parts of the world
• challenges related to working from home versus working in an office
• transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic
• the historical roots of the private prison industry
• challenges faced by college graduates entering the workforce during the 2008 recession
• Does requiring students to keep their cameras on during remote learning cause body image issues?
• How is mass incarceration linked to voter suppression?
• Why do employers hire fewer college graduates?

Tip: Use more than one of these types of frames/questions to make your topic even more specific.

Once you have narrowed your topic, you can work on developing a research question that you want to explore. Try brainstorming questions related to your subtopics to develop your research question.

Generate a list of questions that interest you

Questions related to education and its subtopics:

• What is the future of online education?
• Is the traditional education model the most effective?
• Does the Common Core result in better prepared students?
• What are the effects of focusing on STEM education?
• How can we better fund education in America?

Questions related to crime and its subtopics:

• Why are children being tried as adults?
• How should drug offenses be addressed within the criminal justice system?
• How is racial profiling affecting arrest demographics?
• Do for-profit prisons incentivize putting more people in prison?
• Is the purpose of prison to rehabilitate or punish people?
• What are some alternatives to incarceration and how do they affect crime rates?

Questions related to work and its subtopics:

• What are the earnings differences between groups (men and women, university graduates, high school graduates, immigrants, etc.) of workers?
• What are the effects of absenteeism in a specific industry?
• How does sexual harassment affect workplace relationships?
• How do family leave policies impact turnover and retention?

Once you have generated as many research questions as you can for narrowing the topic, choose the option that is most interesting to you and that you think will best fit the length and purpose of your assignment.

Focusing your Research Question

Your project’s focus will be the research question you choose to explore and the conclusions you reach. Begin the research and writing process using the following tips:

• Research your question: Now that you have a research question, you can begin exploring possible answers to it. Your research question allows you to begin researching in a clear direction. Use keywords from your question to search library databases or Google Scholar .
• Create a thesis statement: Once you have a clear understanding of your research question and have developed some answers or conclusions, you can create your thesis statement. Your paper or project will be an extension of your thesis statement where you explain and support your focused topic very specifically.
• Stay flexible: As you continue researching, you may find that you have new information, new answers, or conclusions about your topic. Remember that you can always modify your thesis. Most writers do not really finalize their thesis statement until the last draft of their paper, so think about the focus as a starting point. Your thesis is not set in stone -- it's a flexible concept that is subject to change, and adjusting it is part of the normal research process.
• Next: Research Help >>
• Last Updated: Nov 12, 2021 11:31 AM
• URL: https://libguides.york.cuny.edu/research

Developing a Research Question

Midway through a semester is no time to discover that your research topic is too broad or too narrow, or that your available sources are too skimpy or too difficult to locate. A preliminary search of your broad category will provide an overview from which to begin narrowing your topic.

The process will help you identify aspects that trigger your curiosity, establish some boundaries with which to limit your inquiry and lead you to some manageable research questions. Before selecting a topic for your research project you'll want to consider its scope: you'll want to narrow it from a broad category to a specific inquiry with some well defined boundaries.

Once you've narrowed your research topic, you can begin shaping your question. Keep in mind that your question should be debatable and interesting.

If you begin with a broad, general interest in social problems in large cities, for instance, you might ask more specifically: "What happens to teenage runaways on the streets of Manhattan?"

Or, if you started with a general interest in contemporary architecture, a specific question might be: " Who in America today is good at designing sports arenas?"

Brainstorming

Brainstorming can help you define a research question. Take fifteen or twenty minutes and let your thoughts roam-jot down the questions that come to mind-even those that seem useless. When you look over your list, you may find one or two that appear more promising than others. Remember not to edit your ideas during the brainstorming session. Save your evaluation for later.

Size Up The More Promising Questions

You're looking for manageability. Which questions are narrow enough for a fruitful investigation using the library, the Internet or some field work? Many will have too wide a scope for the time constraints of a semester. Here are some examples:

• How is the climate of the earth changing?
• Why does poverty exist?
• What's going on in outer space?

Too narrow of a question will also cause problems. Avoid restricting yourself to the point where finding relevant sources becomes difficult or impossible. For example:

• How did John F. Kennedy's maternal grandfather influence the decisions he made during his first month as president?

If one or two sources will answer your question, it may not be substantial enough to bother with, either. Your paper will be too thin, a summary rather than a true research paper. Avoid questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no, or a few statistics. In the end, they just aren't interesting enough to pursue.

• Are there more black students or white students in the freshman class this year?

The question doesn't have enough meat on the bone. By focusing on something more specific regarding a significant issue, you will find more and better information. Your document will also be far more interesting to research and write. Questions regarding issues that people take seriously and about which they are more passionate inevitably lead to a livelier debate:

• What is the ratio of black students to white students on campus and how does it effect everyday student relations?

Honing Your Question

Honing your question is the final step. When your preliminary inquiry is tentatively shaped, ask yourself some questions about your question:

• Is the scope of your question appropriate: not too wide, not too narrow?
• Is it manageable within the time constraints allowed?
• Will the answer fit the page and word requirements of the assignment?
• Can you find sufficient and timely information in the library?
• Will Internet, Web, and field research produce more source material?
• Is your question simple enough to seek just one answer, not several?
• Is it specific enough that your audience will understand your objective?
• Will the results be interesting? Does it concern a real and debatable issue?
• Does your question really interest you? Do you honestly crave the answer?

Citation Information

Mike Palmquist and Peter Connor. (1994-2024). Developing a Research Question. The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/writing/guides/.

Copyright Information

Copyright © 1994-2024 Colorado State University and/or this site's authors, developers, and contributors . Some material displayed on this site is used with permission.

Think Like a Researcher: Instruction Resources: #6 Developing Successful Research Questions

• Guide Organization
• Overall Summary
• #1 Think Like a Researcher!
• #2 How to Read a Scholarly Article
• #3 Reading for Keywords (CREDO)
• #4 Using Google for Academic Research
• #4 Using Google for Academic Research (Alternate)
• #5 Integrating Sources
• Research Question Discussion
• #7 Avoiding Researcher Bias
• #8 Understanding the Information Cycle
• #9 Exploring Databases
• #10 Library Session
• #11 Post Library Session Activities
• Summary - Readings
• Summary - Research Journal Prompts
• Summary - Key Assignments
• Jigsaw Readings
• Permission Form

Course Learning Outcome:   Develop ability to synthesize and express complex ideas; demonstrate information literacy and be able to work with evidence

Goal:  Develop students’ ability to recognize and create successful research questions

Specifically, students will be able to

• identify the components of a successful research question.
• create a viable research question.

What Makes a Good Research Topic Handout

These handouts are intended to be used as a discussion generator that will help students develop a solid research topic or question. Many students start with topics that are poorly articulated, too broad, unarguable, or are socially insignificant. Each of these problems may result in a topic that is virtually un-researchable. Starting with a researchable topic is critical to writing an effective paper.

Research shows that students are much more invested in writing when they are able to choose their own topics. However, there is also research to support the notion that students are completely overwhelmed and frustrated when they are given complete freedom to write about whatever they choose. Providing some structure or topic themes that allow students to make bounded choices may be a way mitigate these competing realities.

These handouts can be modified or edited for your purposes.  One can be used as a handout for students while the other can serve as a sample answer key.  The document is best used as part of a process.  For instance, perhaps starting with discussing the issues and potential research questions, moving on to problems and social significance but returning to proposals/solutions at a later date.

• Research Questions - Handout Key (2 pgs) This document is a condensed version of "What Makes a Good Research Topic". It serves as a key.
• Research Questions - Handout for Students (2 pgs) This document could be used with a class to discuss sample research questions (are they suitable?) and to have them start thinking about problems, social significance, and solutions for additional sample research questions.
• Research Question Discussion This tab includes materials for introduction students to research question criteria for a problem/solution essay.

Additional Resources

These documents have similarities to those above.  They represent original documents and conversations about research questions from previous TRAIL trainings.

• What Makes a Good Research Topic? - Original Handout (4 pgs)
• What Makes a Good Research Topic? Revised Jan. 2016 (4 pgs)
• What Makes a Good Research Topic? Revised Jan 2016 with comments

Topic Selection (NCSU Libraries)

Howard, Rebecca Moore, Tricia Serviss, and Tanya K. Rodrigues. " Writing from sources, writing from sentences ." Writing & Pedagogy 2.2 (2010): 177-192.

Research Journal

Assign after students have participated in the Developing Successful Research Topics/Questions Lesson OR have drafted a Research Proposal.

Think about your potential research question.

• What is the problem that underlies your question?
• Is the problem of social significance? Explain.
• Is your proposed solution to the problem feasible? Explain.
• Do you think there is evidence to support your solution?

Keys for Writers - Additional Resource

Keys for Writers (Raimes and Miller-Cochran) includes a section to guide students in the formation of an arguable claim (thesis).  The authors advise students to avoid the following since they are not debatable. 

• "a neutral statement, which gives no hint of the writer's position"
• "an announcement of the paper's broad subject"
• "a fact, which is not arguable"
• "a truism (statement that is obviously true)"
• "a personal or religious conviction that cannot be logically debated"
• "an opinion based only on your feelings"
• "a sweeping generalization" (Section 4C, pg. 52)

The book also provides examples and key points (pg. 53) for a good working thesis.

• << Previous: #5 Integrating Sources
• Next: Research Question Discussion >>
• Last Updated: Sep 29, 2023 2:51 PM
• URL: https://libguides.ucmerced.edu/think_like_a_researcher

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Whether you’re developing research questions for your personal life, your work for an employer, or for academic purposes, the process always forces you to figure out exactly:

• What you’re interested in finding out.
• What is feasible for you to find out given your time, money, and access to information sources.
• How to find information, including what research methods will be necessary and what information sources will be relevant.
• What kind of claims you’ll be able to make or conclusions you’ll be able to draw about what you found out.

For academic purposes, you may have to develop research questions to carry out both small and large assignments. A smaller assignment may include doing research for a class discussion or to, say, write a blog post for a class; larger assignments may have you conduct research and critical assessment, then report it in a lab report, poster, term paper, or article. For large projects, the research question (or questions) you develop will define or at least heavily influence:

• Your topic , which is a part of your research question, effectively narrows the topic you’ve first chosen or been assigned by your instructor.
• What, if any, hypotheses you test.
• Which information sources are relevant to your project.
• Which research methods are appropriate.
• What claims you can make or conclusions you can come to as a result of your research, including what thesis statement you should write for a term paper or what you should write about in the results section based on the data you collected in your science or social science study.

Influence on Thesis

Within an essay, poster, or term paper, the thesis is the researcher’s answer to the research question(s). So as you develop research questions, you are effectively specifying what any thesis in your project will be about. While perhaps many research questions could have come from your original topic, your question states exactly which one(s) your thesis will be answering . For example, a topic that starts as “desert symbiosis” could eventually lead to a research question that is “how does the diversity of bacteria in the gut of the Sonoran Desert termite contribute to the termite’s survival?” In turn, the researcher’s thesis will answer that particular research question instead of the numerous other questions that could have come from the desert symbiosis topic.

Developing research questions is all part of a process that leads to the specificity of your project.

Tip: Don’t Make These Mistakes

Sometimes students inexperienced at working with research questions confuse them with the search statements they will type into the search box of a search engine or database when looking for sources for their project. Or, they confuse research questions with the thesis statement they will write when they report their research. The activity below will help you sort things out.

Influence on Hypothesis

If you’re doing a study that predicts how variables are related, you’ll have to write at least one hypothesis. The research questions you write will contain the variables that will later appear in your hypothesis(es).

Influence on Resources

You can’t tell whether an information source is relevant to your research until you know exactly what you’re trying to find out. Since it’s the research questions that define that, they divide all information sources into two groups: those that are relevant to your research and those that are not—all based on whether each source can help you find out what you want to find out and/or report the answer.

Influence on Research Methods

Your research question(s) will help you figure out what research methods you should use because the questions reflect what your research is intended to do. For instance, if your research question relates to describing a group, survey methods may work well. But they can’t answer cause-and-effect questions.

Influence on Claims or Conclusions

The research questions you write will reflect whether your research is intended to describe a group or situation, to explain or predict outcomes, or to demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship(s) among variables. It’s those intentions and how well you carry out the study, including whether you used methods appropriate to the intentions, that will determine what claims or conclusions you can make as a result of your research.

Exercise: From Topic to Thesis Statement

Critical Thinking in Academic Research Copyright © 2022 by Cindy Gruwell and Robin Ewing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What is a claim?

A claim is a statement that presents an idea or series of ideas as arguments. Arguments therefore consist of claims, or another way to put it is, to say that claims are the building blocks of a good argument.

In research writing, claims will be the backbone that form a thesis or a hypothesis (here the term ‘hypothesis’ refers to the argument that is evidenced within the scope of the work).

According to Heady (2013) “Claims are the points you want to prove, interpretations you want to offer, and assertions you want to make” (p. 74). Importantly, in academia claims are statements that can be supported by evidence.

‘Traditional classroom teaching is boring’

For example, claiming that traditional classroom teaching is boring is not a good claim because it lacks definition (what does ‘traditional classroom teaching’ actually mean? and how do we measure ‘boring’)? It may also be a ‘sweeping statement’ (meaning it’s far too general in scope). However, claiming that “traditional teaching methods, like didactic instruction, do not provide sufficient interaction with students and lead to poor learning outcomes” is a good argumentative claim, because it can be investigated and measured.

Characteristics of a good claim

In order to make effective claims it is important to understand the difference between statements  and  sentences. While a statement is also a sentence (in that it is a grammatical unit with subject, verb, object clause), not all sentences are statements (in other words, not all sentences consist of a stance or a position).

The following provides examples of the difference between sentences and statements. The statements present a stance or position about the topic under discussion. This is important to understand as all claims must consist of a stance towards the topic.

Function of claims

The function of claims in academic writing is to provoke, analyse, or interpret rather than merely describe or present facts. They can do this by affirming, acknowledging, confirming, or refuting the proposition being made. In this way, claims do the job of building an overall argument or thesis in a piece of work (i.e. each claim progresses the key argument). It is for this reason that claims will appear in topic sentences, thesis statements, introductory and concluding sentences/paragraphs.

Check your understanding

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Research Skills

Building on your research question.

Whether you’re developing research questions for your personal life, your work for an employer, or for academic purposes, the process always forces you to figure out exactly:

• What you’re interested in finding out;
• What it’s feasible for you to find out (given your time, money, and access to information sources);
• How you can find it out, including what research methods will be necessary and what information sources will be relevant; and
• What kinds of claims you’ll be able to make or conclusions you’ll be able to draw about what you found out.

For academic purposes, you may have to develop research questions to carry out both large and small assignments. A smaller assignment may be to do research for a class discussion or to, say, write a blog post for a class; larger assignments may have you conduct research and then report it in a lab report, poster, term paper, or article.

For large projects, the research question (or questions) you develop will define or at least heavily influence:

• Your topic , in that research questions effectively narrow the topic you’ve first chosen or been assigned by your instructor;
• What, if any, hypotheses you want to test;
• Which information sources are relevant to your project;
• Which research methods are appropriate; and
• What claims you can make or conclusions you can come to as a result of your research, including what thesis statement you should write for a term paper or what results section you should write about the data you collected in your own science or social science study.

Sometimes students inexperienced at working with research questions confuse them with the keywords they will type into the search box of a search engine or database when looking for sources for their project. Or, they confuse research questions with the thesis statement they will write when they report their research.

The steps for developing a research question, listed below, can help you organize your thoughts.

Once you know the order of the steps, only three skills are involved in developing a research question:

• Imagining narrower topics about a larger one;
• Thinking of questions that stem from a narrow topic; and
• Focusing questions to eliminate their vagueness.

Every time you use these skills it’s important to evaluate what you have produced; doing so is just part of the process of turning your drafts of questions into a more finished product that reflects your evolution in brainstorming.

Maybe you have a topic in mind, but aren’t sure how to form research questions around it. The trick is to think of a question related to your topic, but not answerable with a quick search. Also, try to be specific so that your research question can be fully answered in the final product for your research assignment.

Sometimes the first draft of a research question is still too broad, which can make your search for sources more challenging. Refining your question to remove vagueness or to target a specific aspect of the topic can help.

check your understanding

The first draft research questions below are not focused enough. Read them and identify at least one area of vagueness in each. Then, check your vagueness with what we identified. It’s great if you found more than we did because that can lead to research questions of greater specificity. See the bottom of the page for the answers.

• Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research. Authored by : The Ohio State University. Provided by : Ohio State University Libraries. Project : Ohio State University Libraries Teaching and Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

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2 -Research Questions

Developing Your Research Question

Because of all their influence, you might worry that research questions are very difficult to develop. Sometimes it can seem that way. But we’ll help you get the hang of it and, luckily, none of us has to come up with perfect ones right off. It’s more like doing a rough draft and then improving it. That’s why we talk about developing research questions instead of just writing them.

Steps for Developing a Research Question

The steps for developing a research question, listed below, can help you organize your thoughts.

Step 1: Pick a topic (or consider the one assigned to you).

Step 2: Write a narrower/smaller topic that is related to the first.

Step 3: List some potential questions that could logically be asked in relation to the narrow topic.

Step 4: Pick the question that you are most interested in.

Step 5: Change that question you’re interested in so that it is more focused.

MOVIE: Developing Research Questions

Once you know the steps and their order, only three skills are involved in developing a research question:

• Imagining narrower topics about a larger one,
• Thinking of questions that stem from a narrow topic, and
• Focusing questions to eliminate their vagueness.

Every time you use these skills, it’s important to evaluate what you have produced—that’s just part of the process of turning rough drafts into more finished products.

ACTIVITY:  Developing a Research Question

Open activity in a web browser.

Maybe you have a topic in mind, but aren’t sure how to form a research question around it. The trick is to think of a question related to your topic, but not answerable with a quick search. Also, try to be specific so that your research question can be fully answered in the final product for your research assignment.

ACTIVITY: Thinking of Questions

For each of the narrow topics below, think of a research question that is logically related to that topic. (Remember that good research questions often, but not always, start with “Why” or “How” because questions that begin that way usually require more analysis.)

• U.S. investors’ attitudes about sustainability
• College students’ use of Snapchat
• The character Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
• Nature-inspired nanotechnologies
• Marital therapy

After you think of each research question, evaluate it by asking whether it is:

• Logically related to the topic
• In question form
• Not answerable with a quick Google search
• Specific, not vague

Sometimes the first draft of a research question is still too broad, which can make your search for sources more challenging. Refining your question to remove vagueness or to target a specific aspect of the topic can help.

ACTIVITY: Focusing Questions

The first draft research questions below are not focused enough. Read them and identify at least one area of vagueness in each. Check your vagueness with what we identified. It’s great if you found more than we did because that can lead to research questions of greater specificity. See the bottom of the page for the answers.

First Drafts of Research Questions:

• Why have most electric car company start-ups failed?
• How do crabapple trees develop buds?
• How has NASA helped America?
• Why do many first-time elections soon after a country overthrows a dictator result in very conservative elected leaders?
• How is music composed and performed mostly by African-Americans connected to African-American history?

ANSWER TO ACTIVITY: Focusing Questions

Some answers to the “Focusing Questions” Activity above are:

Question 1: Why have most electric car company start-ups failed? Vagueness: Which companies are we talking about? Worldwide or in a particular country?

Question 2: How do crabapple trees develop buds? Vagueness: There are several kinds of crabapples. Should we talk only about one kind? Does it matter where the crabapple tree lives?

Question 3: How has NASA helped America? Vagueness: NASA has had many projects. Should we should focus on one project they completed? Or projects during a particular time period?

Question 4: Why do many first-time elections soon after a country overthrows a dictator result in very conservative elected leaders? Vagueness: What time period are we talking about? Many dictators have been overthrown and many countries have been involved. Perhaps we should focus on one country or one dictator or one time period.

Question 5: How is music composed and performed mostly by African-Americans connected to African-American history? Vagueness: What kinds of music? Any particular performers and composers? When?

An Introduction to Choosing & Using Sources Copyright © 2015 by Teaching & Learning, Ohio State University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Identifying the research question (and an aside about theory)

The model presents the research process as circular, but identifying the research question is a good starting point. In this step, we specify what it is that we want to learn more about. Usually, but not always, this takes the form of a question. It could also be a statement of research purpose, though. When doing empirical research, it’s important to develop a question that can be answered—or that one can attempt to answer—based on observations. A simple research question would be How many candidates for public office use negative campaign advertisements to detract from their opponents? We could come up with a defensible answer (we rarely come up with absolutely conclusive answers in social research) to this question based on observations.

There are other types of questions that empirical social research cannot answer. Empirical social research methods do not answer normative questions. Normative questions are questions that are answered based on opinions, values, and subjective preferences. Normative questions often have the word should in them: Should candidates for public office use negative campaign advertisements? Should donations to churches be tax deductible? Should corporations be required to disclose lobbying expenses? Should universities consider race in making admissions decisions? In these examples, no amount of systematic observation can provide a defensible answer to the question; ultimately, answering these questions is a matter of subjective values. However—and this is a very important however—empirical research can help us develop better informed opinions about these normative questions. To help develop a better informed opinion about whether or not candidates should use negative campaign ads, a researcher might investigate related empirical questions, such as How do negative campaign ads affect voter behavior? and How do negative campaign ads affect voters’ opinions about the endorsing candidate? Social researchers, then, don’t run away from normative questions—most interesting questions are normative—but, instead, look for opportunities for empirical research to shed light on normative questions.

Even this, though, is oversimplifying a bit too much. It’s naïve to think that doing empirical research is value-free. Our values influence our decisions throughout the entire research process, from what we study, to how we make observations, to how we make sense of what we observe. Objectivity is a worthy goal when doing empirical social research, but it is an elusive goal, and we should always try to be aware of and transparent about how our own biases affect our research.

Still other interesting questions are the domain of legal analysis, philosophy, or history, not empirical social science research. Legal analysis is required to tackle questions like Can state governments constitutionally cede authority to local governments to allow or ban carrying handguns in public parks? Questions about events from the distant past (an admittedly ambiguous standard) are generally left to historians, though some questions reside in a gray area where empirical research methods could be used to learn about historical events.

The distinction between the domains of social research and history raises an important point: When conducting social research, our goal is usually to build knowledge that is generalizable ; that is, we usually want to be able to apply what we learned from our observations to other cases, settings, or times. We may make observations of one local election, but with the goal of generating knowledge that could be applied to local elections in other jurisdictions, to future or past local elections, or to citizen participation in administrative rulemaking at the local level. While historians may be more likely to do research to build in-depth knowledge about a single case, we rarely undertake a social research project with the goal of generating knowledge that would be applied only to understanding what we’ve directly observed. (A partial exception to this would be when we conduct case studies, discussed later—but this is only a partial exception.)

Empirical research questions can have different purposes. Some empirical social science research questions seek to describe social phenomena. Sometimes, you’ll see the phrase mere description used, and some research methods textbook authors will say that description doesn’t even count as research. This is nonsense. Describing social phenomena based on systematic observations is certainly a legitimate purpose of social science research.

When these textbook authors diminish the importance of description, what they have in mind as more suitable research purposes are explanation and prediction . By pursuing these research purposes, we are now exploring questions of causality. If we’re explaining something, we’ve observed something occur, and then we’re looking back in time, in a sense, to figure out what caused it to occur: Why were high- and middle-income independent voters less likely to vote for the Democratic candidate than low-income independent voters in the last gubernatorial election? There, we’ve observed something interesting about the last gubernatorial election, and we want to figure out what happened before to explain it. If we’re predicting something, we observe past trends or the state of things now and use those observations to predict what will happen in the future: How will low-income voters vote in the upcoming state senate election? We’ll come back to the notion of causality shortly.

Research questions with the purposes of description, explanation, and prediction are all pursued using a broad range of social research methods. A fourth research purpose, understanding , though, is more tightly coupled with a narrower range of research methods—those methods that center around collecting and analyzing qualitative data . Qualitative data are usually words, but they can also be pictures or sounds—basically, any data that are not numeric. Transcripts of interviews with campaign managers, the text of administrative agencies’ requests for proposals, the text of Supreme Court opinions, survey respondents’ answers to open-ended questions, and pictures of people in a political protest are all examples of qualitative data. (Quantitative data, on the other hand, are numeric. More on different types of data later.) With the research purpose of understanding , we are not using the term “understanding” in its colloquial sense; instead, we mean “understanding” with the connotation of verstehen , a German word that doesn’t translate into English very well but carries the idea of understanding someone else’s subjective experiences. When conducting research with the goal of verstehen , we want to achieve an in-depth understanding of others’ opinions, attitudes, motivations, beliefs, conceptual maps, and so on. Typically, this would involve talking with them, listening to their words, or reading what they’ve written—thus the association of qualitative data collection with research questions that have the goal of achieving understanding-qua- verstehen .

To be clear: Research projects with the purposes of description, explanation, and prediction use the full range of research methods, including the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data; research projects with the purpose of understanding generally use methods focused on collecting qualitative data.

Research questions, then, can pursue one or more of these four purposes—description, explanation, prediction, and understanding—but where do research questions come from? At some point in their studies, most students will know the fear of the blank page: Where do I start? What is my research question? Research questions might occasionally arrive in a flash of inspiration, but, usually, their origins are more mundane and require more work. I think most social researchers would agree that their research questions come from some combination of four starting points: deduction, induction, previous research, and what I’ll just describe for now as one of the research profession’s dirty little secrets.

The classic “correct” textbook answer to the question of where research questions come from is deduction from theory. By employing deductive thinking, we start with a theory and deduce the research questions that it suggests.

Before going any further into deducing research questions, though, we should pause for a moment on that other term, theory . A theory is simply a set of concepts and relationships among those concepts that helps us understand or explain some phenomenon—for us, a social phenomenon. Sometimes, theories are very formal; they’re written down in a concise statement in a definitive form by a specific author or group of authors, and they include a wholly specified set of concepts; everybody knows what’s in the theory and what’s out. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—that model of human motivation that crops up in every other undergraduate course— comes to mind as an example of a formal theory. In this theory, a specific set of concepts (the need for socialization, the need for security, and so on) are related in a specific way to explain why people do what they do. Other theories, though, are relatively loose; they’re evolving, they’re gleaned from across a wide range of writings and assembled in different ways by different people, and there might be disagreement over precisely which concepts are included and which are not. I once used something called “crowding out theory” as it applies to charitable giving to nonprofit organizations, and I had to piece together my own version of this theory by reading what a lot of other people had written about it. My version would have looked somewhat like others’, but not identical. My formulation of the theory linked concepts like charitable giving, government funding, donors’ perceptions of government funding, and nonprofit managerial capacity to predict how charitable donors would react to nonprofit organizations receiving different types of government subsidy.

(A quick aside to students interested in studying public policies, programs, and organizations. You are my people. When we conduct research about a particular program, public policy, or organization, a model of the program, policy, or organization often plays the role of theory in the research process. A logic model, for example, depicts a program in terms of its inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes—not unlike a set of concepts and relationships among those concepts. I’ve provided an example of a logic model and how it can generate a lot of applied research questions in Appendix A.)

… Everyone else—just in case you skipped that last paragraph: You should read Appendix A, too—you’ll find the examples of empirical research questions helpful.

A theory (or program, policy, or organization model), needn’t be such a complicated thing, but I think many students are like I was as an undergraduate student (and even into my graduate student years): intimidated by theory. I didn’t totally understand what theory was, and I thought handling theory was best left to the professionals. Like most students, I thought of theory as an antique car—the kind of antique car that is kept in pristine condition, all shiny and perfect, in its climate-controlled garage, rolled out only to show off, and then rolled back in for safe keeping. It turns out, though, that most researchers don’t view theories this way at all. Instead, they view their theories as beat-up pickup trucks. They’re good insofar as they’re useful for doing their job. It’s OK if they get dinged up in the process. They’re not just rolled out for showing off; they’re used to help understand the world, driven as far as they’ll go. (I stole this analogy from one of my professors, Gordon Kingsley, but, like a good theory, I’ve modified it a bit to suit our purposes here.)

As suggested by our model of the research process, theory is at the center of the entire process (not just at the beginning like in some other models). It’s the touchstone for every step along the way, including the step at hand: identifying a research question. To develop a research question, we can start with a theory and all its concepts and relationships among those concepts to deduce research questions—questions that, essentially, ask whether the theory matches observations in the real world. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, for example, might suggest the question, Are voters whose basic needs are not being met more likely than others to support candidates who promise to alleviate citizens’ security and safety needs? Here, we have developed a question that uses a theory as a starting point for explaining a political phenomenon. How did we deduce this research question from our theory? The theory helped us identify relevant concepts, like voters’ security and safety needs and candidates’ promises to alleviate them, and a potential relationship between these concepts and what we’re interested in explaining, voters’ choice of candidate. (And like most empirical research based on Maslow’s theory, alas, we might have difficulty finding much empirical support for it.)

Research questions may also be developed inductively by observing social phenomena and then developing research questions based on what has been observed. Perhaps you observe more men than women in your political science courses but not in your other courses. You can make this casual observation the basis of a research question: Are men more likely to take political science courses than women? or How does students’ sex relate to their course selection? or How does gender socialization affect students’ selection of majors? Researchers with an application orientation may simply experience a problem and develop a research question to figure out how to overcome it: Why did unemployment benefit claim processing time increase by 50% last year? You may find that your casual observations reflect regularities confirmed through systematic observations, and, ultimately, you may even develop a theory or modify an existing theory based on what you learned. So, whereas a deductive research process begins with theory and generalizations that lead to observation, an inductive research process begins with observations that lead to generalizations and theory.

Our model of the research process points to another source of research questions: previous research. Previous research usually refers to all of the publications that report the results of research that has already been conducted on a given topic. We use previous research to develop research questions in a couple of ways. If there’s a social phenomenon we’d like to learn more about, a good starting point is to read all of the previous research on that topic. Once we have a command of that body of knowledge, we can identify gaps, internal inconsistencies, unresolved questions, and emerging research directions in the literature. It’s one small step further to develop research questions that build on the existing body of research. Sometimes, using previous research is more literal; often, an article, chapter, or book will include a section titled something like “Recommendations for future research,” and, voilà, you have a research question. (As portrayed in the model, generating research questions isn’t the only use of previous research; it’s used throughout the entire research process, as we’ll see.)

And then there’s the dirty little secret of the social research professions. Sometimes we begin, not nobly with a theory, not astutely with our own observations, not studiously with previous research, but shamelessly with available data. An aspiring researcher can simply comb through data in hand in search of a research question that can be asked of it. Have access to data collected through the General Social Survey, a public opinion survey conducted every two years?

Read through the table of contents, find some questions that might go together, and try it out. Let the availability of the data—not theoretic or practical import or even your own casual observations—make you interested in a research question. This approach is roundly criticized because it smacks of data fishing; it’s almost always possible to find some patterns in your data, even if it’s just a fluke. Data fishing is exploiting these fluky patterns by making them seem important even when they’re not. Baseless dataset dredging is not a good starting point for conducting research. It happens, though. Untenured assistant professors and dissertation- writing doctoral students are under tremendous pressure to publish research, and the unfortunate truth is that papers reporting “null findings” don’t get published very often. Safer to start with a pattern you’ve stumbled upon in your data and then figure out how to make it sound important, like something you went looking for, so the thinking goes. This approach isn’t entirely bad; there are legitimate ways to conduct data mining (the more acceptable term). Data are collected because someone thought they were important, so it’s not inconceivable that you could uncover important, unanticipated patterns in your data. Thinly disguised data fishing, though, is quickly identified and disregarded by other scholars.

Before we wrap up our consideration of research questions, we should spend a moment unpacking the notion of causality. Three concepts will help us understand how social research approaches questions of cause-and-effect: probabilistic causality , multiple causation , and underlying causal mechanisms . When we seek causal explanations in social research, we rarely talk in absolutes. The type of causality often studied in the physical sciences is deterministic causality , meaning definite cause-and-effect relationships: Flipping the switch causes the light to come on . In the social sciences (though not exclusively in the social sciences), we are almost always studying questions of probabilistic causality, meaning cause-and-effect relationships that are more or less likely to occur: People are less likely to vote for incumbents when the unemployment rate is high . We are also almost always explaining and predicting phenomena that have multiple, interacting causes—multiple causation. Why do some people have higher incomes than others? This surely has many causes—education, age, ability, parents’ wealth, motivation, discrimination, opportunity, job choice, attitudes toward work and money, and so on. And these causes, themselves, affect each other. Much advanced social research attempts to figure out these complex, interacting cause-and-effect relationships. When we make causal claims like age affects income , we are really masking a more complex web of cause-and-effect relationships. Does our age really, inherently, affect our income? Not really. Age affects income in the sense that this ostensible relationship is the manifestation of a more complex underlying causal mechanism. This underlying causal mechanism explains why age seems to affect income—a cause-and-effect story about biological development, the accumulation of education and experience, and the demands of different stages of life. We’ll revisit underlying causal mechanisms in the next section when we learn about independent and dependent variables.

A quick, somewhat easy-to-read introduction to empirical social science research methods Copyright © 2022 by Christopher S. Horne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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