Critical Skills: Designing Research Questions
Designing research questions is a foundational step in the research process, guiding the direction and scope of a project. Effective research questions emerge from a clear understanding of the topic, often developed through preliminary research that reveals existing knowledge and gaps. These questions should be open-ended, clear, and concise, steering clear of simple yes or no answers, and must consider the audience's interests to ensure relevance and usefulness. Critical skills such as information literacy, professional ethics, and revision abilities are essential for crafting quality research questions. Researchers must analyze previous work in their field and critically assess whether their questions can be answered ethically and beneficially. The quality of research questions significantly influences the overall success of a project, as they serve as the foundation for subsequent research activities. Utilizing frameworks, such as the acronym FINGER (feasible, interesting, novel, good for your career, ethical, and relevant), can help researchers evaluate the strength of their questions. Ultimately, well-designed research questions not only enhance academic and professional pursuits but also contribute valuable insights to their respective fields.
Critical Skills: Designing Research Questions
Designing research questions is one of the earliest steps in the research process. Research questions are those that a research project aims to answer. People use research questions to guide research projects, and designing these questions is an essential part of the research process because the entire project rests about these questions.
People conduct research for school, their professions, and their personal lives, and research questions can guide all these types of research. All research is based on an idea that the researcher wants to know more about. The topic of a research project will depend on what the person wants to know. People who can choose topics for their research usually choose those that interest them or are important to them. Sometimes in academic and professional settings, researchers are required to investigate certain topics. At times, researchers work in teams and may collaborate to choose a topic and develop a corresponding project.
Once a researcher identifies a topic for a research project, he or she conducts initial research to learn more about the topic and what others already know about it. This initial investigation helps the researcher begin to construct research questions. For example, a researcher might learn about other research questions that have already been asked and answered. That researcher might choose to avoid those questions since they have already been answered. Often, researchers begin to generate research questions in this phase, as they learn more about the topic and naturally develop questions about aspects of it that they would like to learn more about.
After conducting initial research and analyzing the information they found, researchers can design the first draft of their research questions. The questions should relevant and helpful. Answering the question should help someone or a group of individuals. Researchers should consider their audience when developing the research questions. Understanding the final audience can help a researcher create a question with an answer that is of interest to the audience. Research questions should be open-ended, which means they cannot be answered with a simple yes or no answer. They should also be clear and concise. Researchers should use specific language and remove any unnecessary words or phrases. Research questions should also be focused enough that that the research project will have a clear, focused topic.
After researchers revise their research questions, they can use them to design and implement the rest of the research project. Researchers should keep their work, including any studies or research they do, focused on answering the research questions.
Core Skills & Competencies
Those who develop research questions are most successful if they have numerous other skills. Information literacy is one of these skills. Information literacy is a person’s ability to find, evaluate, and use information. Researchers who write research questions conduct preliminary research about a topic to better understand it and the research that has already been conducted on the topic. The information people find in this preliminary research helps them focus their questions and understand how their research will be similar to and different from other research done on the topic. Those who do not have good information literacy may not understand the research that has already been conducted.
Researchers who develop research questions should also have high standards of professional ethics. This is especially true when professionals or students are crafting research questions for which they will design real-life experiments or make real-life observations. Since the research questions necessarily affect the rest of the research process—including any experiments or observations—researchers must weigh ethical considerations when they write their questions. In general, this means that researchers should consider whether answering the question will be helpful to anyone or any group. It also means that they should determine whether gathering the data, observations, or evidence needed to answer the questions can be done ethically. If the answers to the questions are unhelpful or cannot be found using ethically, the researchers should most likely replace the questions.
Creating research questions also requires individuals to have good revision skills. Writers should revise their research questions after first drafting them. The best research questions are focused, precise, and concise. A researcher’s first draft of a question may not meet all the criteria of a good research question. The researcher should revise the question until it has all the necessary elements so that the research process goes as smoothly as possible. A question may need to be revised several times before it is a good question.
Critical thinking is another important skill that helps when trying to create good research questions. Critical thinking requires a researcher to analyze information and make judgments. The researcher must use critical thinking when determining the best topic to research. This skill can also help the researcher analyze previous research conducted on the same topic. Thinking critically about the topic, the information the researcher already knows, and the research others have done can help the researcher create a relevant and useful question that can be answered through research or observation.
Research & Theory
Experts agree that the quality of research questions influences the entire research project. Research questions are the foundation of a research project, and a project can be successful only if it has a high-quality research question at its core. Since the researcher believes the answer to the question is beneficial, he or she should ensure that the project is the best that it can be. Furthermore, professionals assert that high-quality research questions are also necessary for researchers to receive support for their projects. In academia, many students must consult with their advisors about their work. This is especially true for those working toward graduate-level degrees. Advisors will generally approve only projects with high-quality research questions. Professionals who complete research projects may face similar situations. A professional’s employer or an organization that plans to fund a professional’s research project will generally approve a research project only when it has high-quality research questions.
Many professional and academic researchers use the acronym FINGER to help them make sure they are designing the best possible research questions. The letters in the acronym stand for feasible, interesting, novel, good (for your career), ethical, and relevant. Feasible questions can be answered with the tools that the researcher has access to. Questions should be interesting so that the researcher and the audience for the research project will care about the project and its results. Questions should novel, meaning that they should ask something new that has not yet been answered in other research projects. Researchers should also ensure that their questions will help their careers or academics to make sure they are wisely using their time and other resources. Questions should be ethical so that the research projects themselves are ethical. Finally, the questions should be relevant, and the research should be able to answer the question, “Why is this question important?” Some researchers in specific fields, such as the medical field, use other strategies to ensure high-quality research questions.
Research questions should also be drafted so that their answers are beneficial in some way. The person, people, or groups who will benefit from the answers to questions will depending on the field and the topic of the research. For example, research questions about which teaching methods are most effective for teaching math to high school students are beneficial to teachers and students because their answers should help teachers do their jobs more effectively and students better learn new information.
Researchers have used peer reviews for hundreds of years to ensure that publications such as journal articles contain high-quality information. Some researchers believe that peer reviews should be an important part of the research question design process. One academic review of research questions asserted that researchers and their work could benefit from the same type of scrutiny used in peer reviews of finished research projects.
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