LBCC LibGuides: 1. Start Your Research: Research Questions

Research Questions

Develop Your Questions
Refine Your Questions

Develop Your Research Question

Research questions are very important. Both professional researchers and successful student researchers develop research questions. That’s because research questions are more than handy tools; they are essential to the research process. By defining exactly what the researcher is trying to find out, these questions influence most of the rest of the steps taken to conduct the research.

Let's assume our assignment is to write a paper about something in the field of "social work."

Use the 5Ws, derived from journalistic approach to uncovering aspects of a story, to uncover the specific aspects of your research topic.
- Who? What population, demographic, or age group are you interested in studying?
- What? What about your broad topic of "social work" are you interested in?
- When? Are you interested in a specific timespan, a historical event, or current trends?
- Where? Which country, state, or city are you interested in studying?
- Why? Why is this important to you?

Refine Your Research Question

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.

You can add more qualifiers to the 5Ws to get alternative and more narrow research questions. In the image below, we add to the Who? What? and Why?

Scope of Research

How Deep Should You Go?

For many students, having to start with a research question is the biggest difference between how they did research in high school and how they are required to carry out their college research projects. It’s a process of working from the outside in: you start with the world of all possible topics (or your assigned topic) and narrow down until you’ve focused your interest enough to be able to tell precisely what you want to find out, instead of only what you want to “write about.”

Visualize narrowing a topic as starting with all possible topics and choosing narrower and narrower subsets until you have a specific enough topic to form a research question.

All Possible Topics – You’ll need to narrow your topic in order to do research effectively. Without specific areas of focus, it will be hard to even know where to begin.
Assigned Topics – Ideas about a narrower topic can come from anywhere. Often, a narrower topic boils down to deciding what’s interesting to you. One way to get ideas is to read background information in a source like Wikipedia.
Topic Narrowed by Initial Exploration – It’s wise to do some more reading about that narrower topic to a)learn more about it and b)learn specialized terms used by professionals and scholars who study it.
Topic Narrowed to Research Question(s) – A research question defines exactly what you are trying to find out. It will influence most of the steps you take to conduct the research.

How Far Should You Go?

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.
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 large and small assignments. A smaller assignment may be to do research for a class discussion or to, say, write a blogpost 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 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 results section you should write about the data you collected in your own science or social science study.

Finding Synonyms

How do you talk about something if you don't know the words to describe it?

Google the issue in your own words and scan articles to see how experts are discussing the topic.
Use the experts' words as your own to search OneSearch and our databases. Find an article that speaks to you .
Explore its title, abstract, and subject terms; this strategy can help illuminate how scholars are discussing your topic.

Rinse and repeat!

Of course, there are alternate methods to identify get more specific with your keywords.

Use online tools such as Thesaurus, WordHippo, or Merriam-Webster Thesaurus to find synonyms for your keywords. These tools can help you quickly find alternative words or phrases that have a similar meaning.
Stay up to date. Keep a running list or journal of the terminology used by experts in your research field. As you read articles or papers take note of the terminology they use. You may find synonyms that you haven't considered before.
- Remember, as you keep a list of synonyms you should also include their context and sources. This will help you greatly when it comes time to building your works cited or annotated bibliogrphy.