How do you develop a research question?
1. Choose your topic — Your instructor might assign a topic or provide a list of topics to choose from. If you are given a choice, choose one in which you have some interest. As mentioned above, you will generally be more interested in researching a topic you are interested in, and create a more interesting assignment.
2. Conduct preliminary/exploratory research — Use your textbook, encyclopedias, handbooks, etc. to find recent information about your topic. You don't need to read everything here, you are trying to familiarize yourself with recent advances, current debates, etc.
Note: You can find handbooks and encyclopedias about your topic by going to the library catalog and typing your topic and "encyclopedia" or "handbook" (use a keyword search). For example: cancer handbook.
3. Narrow your topic — Use journalistic questions to generate ideas to narrow your topic. Below are just some ideas of questions you can ask. Your topic may lend itself to an entirely different set of questions.
- Who? — Who is affected by the topic? Who is researching the topic?
- What? — What is the effect of a treatment on those affected by the topic? What kinds of experiments have researchers tried to determine the cause of the affect? What was the result of the experiments?
- Where? — If there is a geographic component to the topic, what is that?
- When? — Is there a time component to the topic? Has what is known about the topic changed over time?
- Why? — Why was an experiment was done? Why was some other experiment not done?
- How? — How was an experiment done? What methods were used to determine people's attitudes toward the topic?
4. Revise! — You may not be able to get a good research question right off the bat. When you start looking for sources that help you answer your research question, your initial search may result in too many or too few sources. You may have to rewrite your question to refocus your searching to come up with a manageable and researchable research question.
