A good research question is one that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. For example, if your interest is in gender norms, you could ask, “Does gender affect a person’s performance in school?” but you will have nothing left to say once you discover your yes or no answer. Instead, ask: “What is the relationship between gender and school performance?” Alternatively, maybe you are interested in: “How or to what extent does gender affect a person’s contributions in small group assignments? By tweaking your question in this small way, you suddenly have much more to say as you attempt to answer it.

A good research question generally has the following features:

• It is written in the form of a question
• It cannot be answered with “yes” or “no”
• It has more than one plausible answer
• It considers relationships among multiple variables
• It is specific and clear about the concepts it addresses
• It includes a target population

Relationships between concepts

A good research question should also have more than one plausible answer. For example, achievement may be impacted by student stereotyping; by teacher stereotyping; or by assessment type (among other issues). Thinking through the possible relationships between gender and achievement (and even the appropriate definition of the terms gender and achievement) would help a researcher realize that there were many plausible answers to questions about how gender affects a person’s academic achievement. Because gender doesn’t exist in a vacuum, researchers need to consider other characteristics that work together, in this case with gender, to shape people’s behaviours, likes, and dislikes. By doing this, the researcher considers the third feature of a good research question: relationships between concepts. In this case we began with an interest in a single concept—achievement—by asking ourselves what other concepts (e.g., gender, stereotype, or assessment) might be related to our original interest, we were able to form questions that considered the relationships among those concepts.

Whatever your topic idea, begin to think about it in terms of a question. What do you really want to know about the topic? As a warm-up exercise, try dropping a possible topic idea into one of the blank spaces below. The questions may help bring your subject into sharper focus and bring you closer towards developing your topic.

1. What does ___ mean?
2. What are the causes of ___?
3. What are the consequences of ___?
4. What are the component parts of ___?
5. How does ___ impact ___?
6. What is it like to experience ___?
7. What is the relationship between _____ and the outcome of ____?
8. What case can be made for or against ___?
9. What are the risk/protective factors for ___?
10. How do people think about ___?

Target population

Educational research questions must contain a target population. Our study would be very different if we were to conduct it on older adult learners or immigrants who just arrived in a new country. The target population is the group of people whose needs your study addresses. Maybe we noticed issues with achievement as part of our teaching practice with first-generation immigrants, and so we made it our target population. Maybe we want to address the needs of another community (like third grade students in a rural school). Whatever the case, the target population should be chosen intentionally.

Because research is an iterative process, one that you will revise over and over, your question will continue to evolve. Your question will also likely change as you engage with the literature on your topic. You will learn new and important concepts that may shift your focus or clarify your original ideas. Trust that a strong question will emerge from this process. A good researcher must be comfortable with altering their question as a result of scholarly inquiry.

Quantitative descriptive questions

The type of research you are conducting will impact the research question that you ask. Probably the easiest questions to think of are quantitative descriptive questions. For example, “What is the average student debt load of education students?” is a descriptive question—and an important one. We aren’t trying to build a causal relationship here. We’re simply trying to describe how much debt education students carry. Quantitative descriptive questions like this one are helpful in education practice as part of community scans, in which researchers survey the various needs of the community they serve. If the scan reveals that the community requires more services related to education, governing bodies like the province or school district can use the community scan to create new programs that meet a defined community need (for example, adult education; pre-school services; after-school services).

Quantitative descriptive questions will often ask for percentage, count the number of instances of a phenomenon, or determine an average. Descriptive questions may only include one variable, such as ours about student debt load, or they may include multiple variables. Because these are descriptive questions, our purpose is not to investigate causal relationships between variables. To do that, we need to use a quantitative explanatory question.

Quantitative explanatory questions

Explanatory research tries to build nomothetic causal relationships. They are generalizable across space and time, so they are applicable to a wide audience. Structurally, quantitative explanatory questions must contain an independent variable and dependent variable. Questions should ask about the relationship between these variables. For example: “What is the relationship between [independent variable] and [dependent variable] for [target population]?”

The table below includes several sample questions, as well as a critique of their strengths and weaknesses.

Making it more specific

A good research question should also be specific and clear about the concepts it addresses. You likely have an impression of what “achievement” means, but is your definition clearly stated and commonly understood? For example, a participant in the study may think that achievement is best represented by GPA, but the researcher may be interested in scores on provincial exams. The only way to ensure your study stays focused and clear is to be specific about what you mean by a concept and to clearly define terms. The student in our example could pick a achievement item that was interesting to them or that the literature indicated was important—for example, literacy or numeracy. Or, the student could have a broader view of achievement, one that encompasses grades across courses and time (like GPA). Any option is probably okay, as long as the researcher is clear on what they mean by “achievement.”

The following table contains some “watch words” that indicate you may need to be more specific about the concepts in your research question.

It can be challenging to be this specific, particularly when you are just starting out your project and still reading the literature. If you’ve only read one or two articles on your topic, it can be hard to know what you are interested in studying. Broad questions like “What are the causes of chronic homelessness, and what can be done to prevent it?” are common at the beginning stages of a research project as working questions. However, moving from working questions to research questions requires that you examine the literature on the topic and refine your question over time to be more specific and clear.

Perhaps you want to study the effect of a specific reading program that you found in the literature. Maybe there is a particular model used to fight antisocial behaviours in school, and create a schoolwide feeling of community, like Caring School Community, that you want to investigate further. You may want to focus on a potential cause of homelessness such as LGBTQ+ discrimination that you find interesting or relevant to your school. As you can see, the possibilities for making your question more specific are almost infinite.

Quantitative exploratory questions

In exploratory research, the researcher doesn’t quite know the lay of the land yet. If someone is proposing to conduct an exploratory quantitative project, the watch words are not problematic at all. In fact, questions such as “What factors influence academic achievement?” are good because they will explore a variety of factors or causes. In this question, the independent variable is less clearly written, but the dependent variable, academic achievement, is quite clearly written. The inverse can also be true. If we were to ask, “What outcomes are associated with small classes in elementary schools?”, we would have a clear independent variable, small classes, but an unclear dependent variable, outcomes. Because we are only conducting exploratory research on a topic, we may not have an idea of what concepts may comprise our “outcomes” or “factors.” Only after interacting with our participants will we be able to understand which concepts are important.

Remember that exploratory research is appropriate only when the researcher does not know much about the topic because there is very little scholarly research. In our examples above, there is extensive literature on the outcomes in small classes and the factors that influence student achievement. Make sure you’ve done a thorough literature review to ensure there is little relevant research to guide you towards a more explanatory question if that is where your interests lie.

Key Takeaways

• Descriptive quantitative research questions are helpful for community scans but cannot investigate causal relationships between variables.
• Explanatory quantitative research questions must include an independent and dependent variable.
• Exploratory quantitative research questions should only be considered when there is very little previous research on your topic.

Qualitative research questions

Qualitative research questions differ from quantitative research questions. They are often more general and openly worded because qualitative research questions seek to explore or describe phenomena, not provide a neat nomothetic explanation. They may include only one concept, though many include more than one. Instead of asking how one variable causes changes in another, we are instead trying to understand the experiences, understandings, and meanings that people have about the concepts in our research question. These keywords often make an appearance in qualitative research questions.

For example: “What is the relationship between school enrolment and adolescents in foster care?” In this question, it is pretty clear that the student believes that adolescents in foster are at a greater risk of school enrolment challenges than their peers not in foster care. This is a nomothetic causal relationship—foster care status causes changes in enrolment. However, what if the student were less interested in predicting enrolment based on foster care status and more interested in understanding the stories of foster care youth who may be at risk for dropout? In that case, the researcher would be building an idiographic causal explanation. The youths whom the researcher interviews may share stories of how their foster families, peers, teachers, and others treated them. They may share stories about how they thought of their own academics ability and how it changed over time. They may have different ideas about what it means to transition out of foster care.

Because qualitative questions usually center on idiographic causal relationships, they look different than quantitative questions. In the following table, the final research questions from the previous table are adapted for qualitative research. The guidelines for research questions previously described in this chapter still apply, but there are some new elements to qualitative research questions that are not present in quantitative questions:

1. Qualitative research questions often ask about lived experience, personal experience, understanding, meaning, and stories.
2. Qualitative research questions may be more general and less specific.
3. Qualitative research questions may also contain only one variable, rather than asking about relationships between multiple variables.

Qualitative research questions have one final feature that distinguishes them from quantitative research questions: they can change over the course of a study. Qualitative research is a reflexive process, one in which the researcher adapts their approach based on what participants say and do. The researcher must constantly evaluate whether their question is important and relevant to the participants. As the researcher gains information from participants, it is normal for the focus of the inquiry to shift.

For example, a qualitative researcher may want to study how a new truancy rule impacts youth at risk of expulsion. However, after interviewing some of the youth in their community, a researcher might find that the rule is actually irrelevant to their behavior and thoughts. Instead, their participants will direct the discussion to their frustration with the school administrators or the lack of job opportunities in the area. This is a natural part of qualitative research, and it is normal for research questions and hypothesis to evolve based on information gleaned from participants.

However, this reflexivity and openness is unacceptable in quantitative research for good reasons. Researchers using quantitative methods are testing a hypothesis, and if they could revise that hypothesis to match what they found, they could never be wrong! Indeed, an important component of open science and reproducibility is the preregistration of a researcher’s hypotheses and data analysis plan in a central repository that can be verified and replicated by reviewers and other researchers. This interactive graphic from 538 shows how an unscrupulous researcher could come up with a hypothesis and theoretical explanation after collecting data by hunting for a combination of factors that results in a statistically significant relationship. This is an excellent example of how the positivist assumptions behind quantitative research and interpretivist assumptions behind qualitative research result in different approaches to social science.

Feasibility and importance

As you are getting ready to finalize your research question and move into designing your research study, it is important to check whether your research question is feasible for you to answer and what importance your results will have in the community, among your participants, and in the research literature.

Key questions to consider when evaluating your question’s feasibility include:

• Do you have access to the data you need?
• If you are collecting primary data, will you be able to get consent from potential study participants?
• Does your project pose risk to individuals through direct harm, dual relationships, or breaches in confidentiality?
• Do you have the resources and time needed to carry out the project?

Is your question worth answering?

Another consideration in starting a research project is whether the issue is important enough to study. For the researcher, your research question should be important enough to put in the effort and time required to study. You should choose a topic that is important to you—one you wouldn’t mind learning about for at least a few months, if not a few years. Time is your most precious resource as a student. Make sure you dedicate it to topics and projects you consider genuinely important.

Your study should also contribute to the larger expanse of research in that area. For example, if your research question is “Does self determination theory (SDT) explain student motivation to engage in class?” you are a few decades late to be asking that question. Hundreds of scientists have published articles demonstrating its effectiveness in understanding student motivation to learn. However, a student interested in learning more about SDT can still find new areas to research. Perhaps there is a new population (teacher motivation) or a new problem (motivation and school change) for which there is little research on the impact of SDT.

Your research project should contribute something new to social science or to education practice. It should address a gap in what we know and what is written in the literature, or help us improve our practice. This can seem intimidating for students whose projects involve learning a totally new topic. How could I add something new when other researchers have studied this for decades? By thoroughly reviewing the existing literature, you can find new and unresolved research questions to answer, even if those equations are focused narrowly on your practice. Google Scholar’s motto at the bottom of their search page is “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Social science research rests on the work of previous scholars, and builds off of what they discovered to learn more about the social world. Ensure that your question will bring our understanding of your topic to new heights.

Finally, your research question should be of import to the social world. Educators conduct research on behalf of individuals, groups, and communities to promote change as part of their mission to advance learning, human rights and further social and economic justice. Your research should matter to the people you are trying to help. Your research project should aim to improve the lives of people in your target population by helping the world understand their needs more holistically.

Key questions to consider when evaluating the importance of your question include:

• Can we answer your research question by looking at the literature on the topic?
• Does your question add something new to the scholarly or professional literature (raises a new issue, addresses a controversy, studies a new population)?
• How will your target population benefit once you answer your research question?
• How will the community, profession, and/or the broader social world benefit once you answer your research question?

Research projects, obviously, do not need to address all aspects of a problem. As educators, our goal in enacting social justice isn’t to accomplish it all in one semester (or even one lifetime). Our goal is to move the world, or even just your class, in the right direction and make small, incremental progress. We encourage all students to think about how they will make their work accessible and relevant to the broader public and use their results to promote change.