What makes a good research question?

Your research question provides a path to follow when you start to conduct your research and describes the desired outcomes of your study. This question, in combination with your chosen approach, helps to narrow the focus of your topic of interest and guides the structure of how you choose and analyze data.

To start, ensure that your topic can be studied. Ask yourself if there is enough research available to draw from or if you will need to design a study to collect the needed data.  From there, you develop your question to narrow your focus. For example, if your research will use a quantitative approach, then your question will focus on the relationships between the variables in your study data.

Next, ensure that your question is clear and simple. Clear, simple questions help to focus the discussion and to provide various viewpoints to consider. A key component of effective questions is that they help to narrow your topic. Here are some resources that help you to narrow your topic so that you build effective research questions:

1. A great video which explores the use of mind maps when breaking down your main area of focus into sub-topics.
2. Another resource that I would recommend can be found here. It describes both narrowing your focus and developing clear, focused and simple research questions.
3. Lastly, the RRU Writing Centre has lots of resources on writing thesis statements. One resource I found especially helpful was Research Questions and Hypothesis by John Creswell.