17 Developing a Researchable Research Question

After thinking about what topics interest you, identifying a topic that is both empirical and sociological, and decide whether your research will be exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory, the next step is to form a research question about your topic.  For many researchers, forming hypotheses comes after developing one’s research question. However, for now, we will just think about research questions.

So then, what makes a good research question?  Let us first consider some practical aspects. A good research question is one that:

1. You are interested in;
2. You have resources (money, technology, assistance, etc) to answer the question;
3. You have access to the data you need (human, animal or numerical/ file data);
4. Is operationalized appropriately;
5. Has a specific objective (anything from explaining something to describing something).

A good research question also has some specific characteristics, as follows:

1. It is generally written in the form of a question;
2. It is also well focused;
3. It cannot be answered with a simple yes or no;
4. It should have more than one plausible answer;
5. It considers relationships amongst multiple concepts.

Generally speaking, your research question will guide whether your research project is best approached with a quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, or other^[1] approaches. Table 3.2 provides some examples of problematic research questions and then suggestions for how to improve each research question.