Whether you’re designing research questions for academic purposes, for work, or for a passion project, the process of creating and developing a research question asks you to figure out:

For academic purposes, you may have to develop research questions to carry out both large and small assignments. A smaller assignment may ask you to do research for a class discussion or to write a blog post for a class; larger assignments may invite you to conduct research and then present it in a lab report, infographic, research paper, or article.

For large projects, the research question (or questions) you develop will define or at least heavily influence:

Adaptations

This section has been adapted from Influence of a Research Question in Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research by Teaching & Learning, Ohio State University Libraries, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.