Information Literacy & Library Research: Research Questions

What is a Research Question?

A research question is the starting point. It poses the point of your research by asking exactly what you are trying to figure out.

When you write a paper, most will require a Thesis Statement. Your thesis statement is the answer you will explain or prove in your research paper. A good research question is the starting point for a good thesis statement, which leads to a good paper.

Question: How can dogs improve the mental health of college students?

Thesis Statement: Interaction with dogs can reduce stress and anxiety in college students during finals.

How to Write a Research Question

Your research question is what you are curious about researching  in the format of a formal question. This question will help you articulate what you are trying to research and focus your topic. It will also help you when brainstorming your keywords and search statements.

Your question needs to be broad enough to cover your whole topic and fill your required number of pages. But it also needs to be narrow enough to actually be answered in that same number of pages.

Here are the basics of what makes a good research question:

• Cannot be answered with a YES or NO response
• Should not be two questions squished into one
• Cannot be answered by a number, word, or phrase (e.g. definition, statistic, etc.)
• Cannot be answered using a single source (e.g. dictionary or Wikipedia article)
• States precisely what is to be answered
• Should not be too broad or too narrow
• Should not be biased, subjective, or leading
• Should represent a topic that is interesting to you
• Should be generative, meaning that it could generate a discussion 

You want your question to say exactly what you want to research in the simplest way possible. Extra words or fillers can really bog down your question. So try to be simple and straightforward. That is why working from the more basic or broadest part of your topic and narrowing down can be a good strategy. If you go too narrow, then take it a step back.

For example, if you started with the broad topic of anxiety, you can then go through the background research process to find ways to narrow that broad topic into something that is researchable and interesting to you.

Something like this: anxiety => anxiety in students => how to help reduce anxiety in students => using therapy dogs to reduce stress in students => using therapy dogs during finals week for stress reduction when taking exams => using therapy dogs to reduce test-taking anxiety

You might then find out as you continue that your topic is too narrow, and then back it up to one of your broader steps, such as going back to “using therapy dogs to reduce stress in students” where you can then talk specifically about test-taking anxiety in your paper without it being the only focus.

Types of Research Questions

Different disciplines will have different styles of research questions, so you should get familiar with how your discipline typically writes their research questions. This article shows examples of different types of questions in different disciplines: 

Qualitative Questions focus on discovering, explaining, and exploring. They can include questions such as:

• Exploratory questions focus on learning about something without influencing the results.

• Predictive research questions are asking you to guess at outcomes based on variables you are examining.

• Interpretive questions study behavior, trying to make sense of the experiences of groups or phenomena.

Quantitative Questions focus on proving or disproving a hypothesis and focus on the relationship between the variables being studied. Types of quantitative questions can include:

• Descriptive questions, which as the name implies is looking to outline or describe a phenomena, such as how, when, or where something occurred.

• Comparative questions similarly compare similarities and differences in phenomena.

• Relationship-based questions which seek out the correlation or connections between variables.

But not all of these research questions are appropriate for a college research paper. Descriptive research questions are usually too basic for an upper level research paper topic, especially when students are not conducting their own original research and are just using existing information. Are you just describing something that is already well known about? Thinking beyond the basics can elevate your research paper, so try to think in comparative or predictive when possible. The following section is all about how to write predictive research questions.

Curious about what research questions are used in your discipline? Ask the professors in your department and start a conversation. 

Three Elements Formula

The Three Elements formula is an easy way to create predictive research questions, since it has you identify a population, variable and then the predicted outcome or effect.

• The population: who the question applies to or in the comparison
• The variable: what is the controllable factor to make the question work?
• The effect: what is the expected outcome or result or effect?

Once you identify these parts of your topic or interests, then you can easily formulate the question. For example, going back to the example of dogs. The population would be college students, the variable is dogs, and the question is the effect on mental health.

College Students + Dogs = Mental Health?

We started off with the topic of Dogs, but really we are looking at how dogs (the variable) affect the mental health (the effect) of college students (the population). Connection words such as effect, affect, result, outcome, compare are usually good ones to use, since they focus on that cause and effect nature that makes a research question more simple and clearly stating what you are interested in.

Good Questions and Bad Questions

Getting the phrasing right on a question really affects the direction of the question, so make sure you use clear and precise wording that states exactly what you want to find out. Any topic can be turned into a good or bad question, depending on how it's phrased. Here are some examples of a good question and some bad versions of the same topic and question. Comparing them might help you get the hang of how to phrase your topic into a question that will really describe what you want to know.