Goals

After reading this article, you will be able to do the following:

• Explain what research questions are and their importance in research design.
• Create your own research questions to undertake your own study.

Introduction

Conducting research is a multi-step process. For many of you, just figuring out what topic you want to study can be a long journey. You might spend weeks or months trying to decide on what is relevant to your personal values and goals, what is important to the world, and sometimes, simply what will help you pass a class. But even after so much time pondering, once you have it, you might ask yourself ok, now what?

Research questions (RQs) can help you focus on specific issues to investigate within your chosen topic, making it easier for you to understand exactly what you will be examining. In addition to that, they are an essential and usually mandatory part of research design because they help you visualize what steps to follow. In other words, they help you foresee what instruments or techniques you will need to apply to get the data required to support your assumptions and preconceptions. In the next few sections, we will address which RQs can help you.

RQs Help You Find Exactly What You Will Be Researching

Let’s say that after a few weeks thinking about it, you decide to research indigenous communities in Utah. What a great topic! But isn’t it a bit broad? We can’t possibly research them all and everything about them, so we need to think about and list issues related to the topic that need more information or that require a distinct perspective. Remember research’s goal is to provide data so that people and institutions can make informed decisions. So, let’s list a few related topic issues:

As you can see, now that we have an issues list, we can move from a general topic to a research problem or study object. That’s a great first step. However, we still need some research questions to make it even more specific, which is good since the more specific we are, the easier it is for us to think about and choose our methodology, goals, assumptions, preconceptions, and study discussions.

The next step is to ask ourselves what we would like to find out and/or what we would like to understand. By answering these two questions, we’ll produce a few research questions. Let’s take Issue 1: Colonization and land appropriation’s lingering effects as an example.

If you take out the first part of the sentence I would like to find out/understand, you have yourself not one but two research questions. Remember that the more specific you are, the better your RQs will be. You can make your RQs more specific by adding exactly what group, age, gender, or phenomenon you will be examining. You may also indicate a time period or place.

Table 1. Less Specific and More Specific Sample Research Questions.

RQs Help You Design Your Methodology

Professors and graduate students have the motto: A good dissertation is a done dissertation, which is meant to remind people that research must be attainable. There is no point envisioning a grandiose project with multiple facets if you cannot achieve it. This is particularly appropriate for ethnography, which tends to be longitudinal. While there are three main data-collection modes in ethnographic studies (Angrosino, 2007), namely observation, interviewing, and archival research, the latter often plays a secondary role. In fact, ethnography is often synonymous with fieldwork and immersion research.

LeCompte and Schensul (2010) differentiate ethnographic research from other social and behavioral sciences by stating that ethnography researchers’ basic tools are their eyes and ears and the fact that they cannot control what happens in the field in which they immerse themselves. Because of that, when conceiving your study, it is important to consider how you will accomplish your project if you are mainly observing and interviewing people. In other words, how feasible are your goals? Better RQs indicate to you what methods you will need to employ to conduct your study and to help you plan accordingly, since they show you your research objectives. Table 2 shows ways you can achieve your research objectives by how you phrase your research questions around a specific phenomenon, which in turn helps you to determine your methodology.

Table 2. Research Objectives Drive Research Questions and Your Methodology.

Note that while research questions must be specific, be careful not to make them too specific. If RQs are too specific, your data collection will also be too specific, and you might end up not having much to discuss. Observe that the previous sample questions start with open-ended question words, such as what and how. But you can also create RQs with other question words, such as where, when, how often, etc. However, because answers can be simple, you will need to develop your ideas and then explain the reasons behind those answers. You can also create yes/no questions such as, “Are indigenous communities still affected by land appropriation”? For some ethnographers, interviewing people might be necessary. Let’s refer to Issue 3: Cultural appropriation, but specifically, let’s focus on the Utes right now to demonstrate more RQs.

Table 3. Sample RQs With Less Specific Question Words and Yes/No Questions.

Note that RQs can also give us a clue of how demanding our study time and resources will be. For instance, if we can connect our research questions to the describe a phenomenon research objective (see Table 2), then our study will probably be shorter than if we have one that indicates evaluating the effects of a phenomenon. While there is no set limit to how many research questions a study should have, it is important to notice that the more we have, the longer our work will be. Class projects often have only one RQ, while a master’s thesis can have three RQs, and a doctorate dissertation may have five or more.

RQs Are Connected to Your Assumptions

The goal of RQs is not only to help you understand what you will be examining but also to communicate to your audience your study’s goal and relevance and how you will achieve this. Thus, by providing your RQs, you might also want to provide what you think the answer will be—your assumption. If we take the Yes/No RQ from Table 3, we can answer it like this:

The data at the end of your project will either corroborate your preconceptions about the topic or provide a different answer. It may feel intuitive to change your RQs if your data goes the opposite direction of what you proposed. After all, you want to show you were correct. Nonetheless, this is considered bad science practice. But it is absolutely acceptable to end your study indicating that your data was surprising and that your assumptions were not evidenced, as long as you provide a discussion on why you think that happened. Remember that we have our own biases. When we visit a community and learn with them and about them, we might find out that our preconceptions do not meet the reality that we immersed ourselves in. The next step is to explain to the world why our preconceptions do not meet that reality and to explain the process that we used to find it out.

Conclusion

In this article, we addressed an important and required part of scientific studies: research questions. The goal of RQs is two-fold: 1) to help the researcher find their research problem—what exactly they will be examining—by moving from a general-interest topic to the specific phenomena within a community; and 2) to determine the methodology and steps we will need to take to carry out our study by indicating what our research objectives are—describe, explain, or evaluate—and make it clear to us how time-consuming our study may be and what techniques we will need to employ. In addition to that, RQs communicate to the reader our study’s objectives and relevance by stating what data type we will be contributing to the field.

Practice

1. Read the statements below and choose if they are True or False. Correct the false ones.
   • a) ___ RQs help us specify our study object and the methodology we will use.
   • b) ___ Every study must have at least five RQs.
   • c) ___ We can also state the answers that we believe we will get for our RQs.
   • d) ___ We should create new RQs if the data do not corroborate our original ones.
2. Read the research questions below and make them more specific by adding demographic information such as age, gender, community, and/or a time period or location.
   • a) How positive has LGBTQ+ media representation been for the community?
   • b) What are art programs’ characteristics?
   • c) What is the relationship between parental leave and men’s participation in parenthood?
   • d) Does affirmative action improve social mobility?
3. Read the topics/issues (LeCompte and Schensul, 2010) below and create two research questions for each.
   • a) Puerto Rican reproductive health practices.
   • b) Pneumonia and child mortality in China.
   • c) AIDS risk and drug use in elder adults.
   • d) The depressed low-income senior housing market.
   • e) Bias in census surveys.

References

Angrosino, M. (2007). Doing ethnographic and observational research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

LeCompte, M. D., & Schensul, J. J. (2010). Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research: An Introduction. Rowman Altamira.

McCombes, S. (2023, May 31). Writing strong research questions: Criteria & examples. Scribbr. Retrieved from https://www.scribbr.com/research-process/research-questions/