Choosing a Research Question
Now that you hopefully have a topic or two in mind within which you’d like to ask a question, let’s talk about actually framing the question in a way that we can answer it with research! This is important, because science, although awesome, can’t answer all questions. To help you begin to identify plausible research questions versus questions best answered with other means, let’s look at some different goals of questioning.
Empirical versus ethical questions
In order to help you better understand the difference between ethical and empirical questions, let’s consider a topic about which people have moral opinions. How about SpongeBob SquarePants? [1] In early 2005, members of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family (2005) [2] denounced this seemingly innocuous cartoon character as “morally offensive” because they perceived his character to be one that promotes a “pro-gay agenda.” Focus on the Family supported their claim that SpongeBob is immoral by citing his appearance in a children’s video designed to promote tolerance of all family forms (BBC News, 2005). [3] They also cited SpongeBob’s regular hand-holding with his male sidekick Patrick as further evidence of his immorality. So, should we conclude that SpongeBob SquarePants is immoral based on this information? Not so fast. While parents, newspapers, or television reporters may provide an answer, a social science researcher cannot. Questions of morality are ethical, not empirical. Of course, this doesn’t mean that social scientists cannot the study opinions or social meanings surrounding SpongeBob SquarePants (Carter, 2010). [4] Social researchers study humans after all, and in the following chapters, you will discover that we are trained to utilize a variety of scientific data-collection techniques to understand patterns of human beliefs and behaviors. Using these techniques, we could find out how many people in the United States find SpongeBob morally reprehensible, but we could never empirically learn whether SpongeBob is in fact morally reprehensible.
* This image was created using napkin.ai; however, the concept, design direction, and creative vision were conceived by Dr. Knight
Writing a good research question
Now that you’ve considered interesting topics and identified a topic that asks an empirical question, you need to form a research question about that topic. So, what makes a good research question? First, it is generally written in the form of a question. It would be incorrect say that your research question is “the opiate epidemic,” “animal assisted therapy,” or “marriage.” You need to frame your topic as a question, not a statement. A good research question is also one that is well-focused. A well-focused question helps you tune-in to only the relevant information about your topic and prevents you from attempting to answer everything about the world all at once. You could be the most eloquent writer in your class, but if your research question is unclear, your work will ultimately fall flat. Remember that each research study is only a small bite out of huge areas of inquiry; don’t try to address everything at once!
In addition to being written in the form of a question and being well-focused, 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 of household tasks?” but you will have nothing left to say once you discover your yes or no answer. Instead, you could ask about the relationship between gender and household tasks. Alternatively, maybe we are interested in how or to what extent gender affects a person’s contributions to housework in a marriage. By tweaking your question in this small way, you suddenly have a much more fascinating question and more to say as you attempt to answer it. Some questions may be so new that we still don’t even know if there is a relationship at all; in those cases, yes and no may be sufficient answers for a first study on a topic. However, most subjects you’ll likely want to read about have some kind of prior work on them, so think about the nuance that you can add once yes/no has been established.
A good research question should also have more than one plausible answer. The student who studied the relationship between gender and household tasks had a specific interest in the impact of gender, but they also knew that preferences might be impacted by other factors. For example, they knew from their own experience that their more traditional and socially conservative friends were more likely to see household tasks as part of the female domain and were less likely to expect their male partners to contribute to those tasks. Thinking through the possible relationships between gender, culture, and household tasks led that student to realize that there were many plausible answers to their questions about how gender affects a person’s contribution to household tasks. Because gender doesn’t exist in a vacuum, they wisely felt that they needed to consider other characteristics that work together with gender to shape people’s behaviors, likes, and dislikes. By doing this, the student considered the third feature of a good research question, which are relationships between several concepts. While they began with an interest in the single concept of household tasks, they questioned what other concepts (such as gender or political orientation) might be related to their original interest. In turn, they were able to form a question that considered the relationships among those concepts.
This student had one final component to consider. Social science research questions must contain a target population. Their study would be very different if they were to conduct it on older adults, new parents, or newly arrived immigrants. The target population is the group of people whose needs your study addresses. If the student noticed issues with household tasks as part of their work with first-generation immigrants, perhaps that would be their target population. Maybe they want to address the needs of a community of older adults. Whatever the case, the target population should be chosen while keeping in mind what issues might face that population and what is known about that population already.
In sum, a good research question generally has the following features:
- It is written in the form of a question
- It is clearly written
- It usually not answerable with a simple “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 contains a target population
Take a few of the questions you’ve written so far while reading this chapter. How do they hold up when you compare them to the list above? Can you adjust your questions in such a way that they meet most or all of the points described? If you’re interested, having a conversation about your questions might be helpful, and an AI partner might be perfect for brainstorming some variations of your questions!
Can I use AI for that?
Show
Intentional Prompts, Ethical Outcomes: Using AI the Right Way
Effective prompts are key in generating accurate and relevant responses when using AI. Previously, we discussed a model that highlights the essential components of a strong prompt. I want to discuss this point further and provide additional information on advanced prompting strategies that may be beneficial when writing AI engine prompts.
To maximize AI’s ethical and effective use, prompts should be structured with clarity, role definition, constraints, and examples. Below are expanded strategies for ethical and responsible AI use, including defining AI’s role, providing precise instructions, establishing boundaries, and offering examples for better guidance.
Cardenas, C. (2025, February 21). Teach students to become AI literate [Professional Development Session]. AI Academy, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, United States.
Well-crafted prompts empower students to take control of AI-generated responses, ensuring that the AI serves as a tool rather than taking the lead. Assigning a role helps tailor the AI’s expertise, while clear instructions improve clarity and relevance. Setting constraints, such as word limits or required sources, keeps responses focused, and providing examples ensures consistency in tone and structure. By guiding the AI with intentional prompts, students remain in charge of the learning process, using AI to support their ideas rather than relying on it to generate them. This approach fosters responsible and insightful content creation across various fields
Evaluating a Question
Let’s look at a few more examples of possible research questions and consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. While reading the table below, keep in mind that the characteristics highlighted below might be only the most relevant strengths and weaknesses of each question. Certainly, each question may have additional strengths and weaknesses not noted in the table.
| Sample question | Question’s strengths | Question’s weaknesses | Proposed alternative |
| What are the internal and external effects/problems associated with children witnessing domestic violence? | Written as a question | Not clearly focused | How does witnessing domestic violence impact a child’s romantic relationships in adulthood? |
| Considers relationships among multiple concepts | Not specific and clear about the concepts it addresses | ||
| Contains a population | |||
| What causes foster children who are transitioning to adulthood to become homeless, jobless, pregnant, unhealthy, etc.? | Considers relationships among multiple concepts | Concepts are not specific and clear | What is the relationship between sexual orientation or gender identity and homelessness for late adolescents in foster care? |
| Contains a population | |||
| Not written as a yes/no question | |||
| Why are mental health rates higher in white foster children then African Americans and other races? | Written as a question | Concepts are not clear | How does race impact rates of mental health diagnosis for children in foster care? |
| Not written as a yes/no question | Does not contain a target population |
Making It More Specific
A good research question should be specific and clear about the concepts it addresses. A student investigating gender and household tasks knows what they mean by “household tasks.” You likely also have an impression of what “household tasks” means. But are your definition and the student’s definition the same? A participant in their study may think that managing finances and performing home maintenance are household tasks, but the researcher may be interested in other tasks like childcare or cleaning. The only way to ensure your study stays focused and clear is to be specific about what you mean by a concept. The student in our example could choose a specific household task, like childcare, or they could choose a broader view of household tasks that encompasses childcare, food preparation, financial management, home repair, and care for relatives. Any option is suitable as long as the researcher is clearly defining “household tasks” as they relate to the study.
The table below contains some “watch words” that indicate you may need to be more specific about the concepts in your research question.
| Watch words | How to get more specific |
| Factors, Causes, Effects, Outcomes | What causes or effects are you interested in? What causes and effects are important, based on the literature in your topic area? Try to choose one or a handful that you consider to be the most important. |
| Effective, Effectiveness, Useful, Efficient | Effective at doing what? Effectiveness is meaningless on its own. What outcome should the program or intervention have? Reduced symptoms of a mental health issue? Better socialization? |
| Etc., and so forth | Get more specific. You need to know enough about your topic to clearly address the concepts within it. Don’t assume that your reader understands what you mean by “and so forth.” |
It can sometimes be challenging to be this specific, particularly when you are just beginning to investigate your topic. If you’ve only read one or two articles on the topic, it can be hard to know what you are interested in studying. Broad questions like “What are the causes of ineffective coparenting following divorce, and what can be done to prevent it?” are common at the beginning stages of a research project. However, social science research demands that you examine the literature on the topic and refine your question over time to be more specific and clearer before you begin your study. Perhaps you want to study the effect of a specific coparenting program that you found in the literature. Maybe there is a particular model for supporting blended families and coparents that you want to investigate further. You may want to focus on a potential cause of divorce that you find interesting or relevant to your experiences, or examine a particular aspect of the experience that you have witnessed or read about. As you can see, the possibilities for making your question more specific are almost infinite.
Qualitative Research Questions
Qualitative research questions seek to explore or describe phenomena, not provide a neat nomothetic explanation, so they are often more general and vaguely worded compared to quantitative research questions. They may include only one concept, though many include more than one. Instead of asking how one variable causes change in another, we are instead trying to understand the experiences, understandings, and meanings that people have about the concepts in our research question. Qualitative research can serve one or several of the following purposes:
Qualitative questions usually look different than quantitative questions because they search for idiographic causal relationships, that is, relationships that are explained by subjective experience. This is less about seeking a universal truth, and more about understanding an individual’s truth from their living of a phenomenon.
The table below takes some quantitative research questions and adapts them 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. First, qualitative research questions often ask about lived experience, personal experience, understanding, meaning, and stories. These keywords indicate that you will be using qualitative methods. Second, qualitative research questions may be more general and less specific. Instead of asking how one concept causes another, we are asking about how people understand or feel about a concept. They may also contain only one variable, rather than asking about relationships between multiple variables.
| Quantitative Research Questions | Qualitative Research Questions |
| How does witnessing domestic violence impact a child’s romantic relationships in adulthood? | How do people who witness domestic violence understand how it affects their current relationships? |
| What is the relationship between sexual orientation or gender identity and homelessness for late adolescents in foster care? | What is the experience of identifying as LGBTQ in the foster care system? |
| How does income inequality affect ambivalence in high-density urban areas? | What does racial ambivalence mean to residents of an urban neighborhood with high income inequality? |
| How does race impact rates of mental health diagnosis for children in foster care? | How do African-Americans experience seeking help for mental health concerns? |
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 their family’s economic insecurity. This is a natural part of qualitative research, and it is normal for research questions and hypothesis to evolve based on the information gleaned from participants. In quantitative studies, it is very rare to change a research question after the study has started; changing the question often necessitates a change in the design and must be well-documented and justified.
Feasibility and Importance
Now that you have thought about topics that interest you and you’ve learned how to frame those topics as research questions, you have probably come up with a few potential research questions—questions to which you are dying to know the answers. However, even if you have identified the most brilliant research question ever, you are still not ready to begin conducting research. Before you start doing any research, you’ll need to devise a plan for your research design, which we’ll start discussing soon. Before we even get to that, though, you need to think about the feasibility and the importance of your research question.
There are a few practical matters related to feasibility that all researchers should consider before beginning a research project. Are you interested in better understanding the day-to-day experiences of maximum-security prisoners? This sounds fascinating, but unless you plan to commit a crime that lands you in a maximum-security prison, gaining access to that facility would be difficult for an undergraduate student project (and potentially time-consuming and challenging even for a professional researcher). Perhaps your interest is in the inner workings of toddler peer groups. However, if you’re much older than four or five, it might be tough for you to access that sort of group. Your ideal research topic might require you to live on a chartered sailboat in the Bahamas for a few years, but unless you have unlimited funding, it will be difficult to make even that happen. While the types of topics that can be studied in social science research seem limitless, researchers must consider the feasibility of the topics and target populations they choose to study.
One of the most important questions in feasibility is whether or not you have access to the people you want to study. For example, let’s say you wanted to better understand students who engaged in self-harm behaviors in middle school. Certainly, this topic is socially important, but if you were a principal, you may not want parents to hear in the news that students are engaging in self-harm at your school. Building a working relationship with the principal and the school administration will be a complicated, yet necessary task to gain access to the study population. Social research must often satisfy multiple stakeholders, or individuals and groups who have an interest in the outcome of your study. The goal of answering your research question can only be realized when the goals of the other stakeholders are accounted for.
Assuming you can gain approval to conduct research with the population that most interests you, do you know if that population will let you in? Researchers who study the behavior of children, like Barrie Thorne (1993), [1] sometimes face this dilemma. Professor Thorne has studied how children teach each other gender norms, as well as how adults “gender” children. For the purposes of this discussion, we will focus on the former aspect of her work. Thorne had to figure out how to study the interactions of elementary school children when they probably would not accept her as one of their own. They were also unlikely to be able to read and complete a written questionnaire. Since she could not join them or ask them to read and write on a written questionnaire, Thorne’s solution was to watch the children. Considering these barriers, observation seemed like a reasonable solution. However, there is always the possibility that her observations differed from the experience of physically joining a class. This example shows how a researcher’s identity and characteristics might sometimes limit (or enhance) their ability to study a topic in the way that they had intended.[2]
In addition to personal characteristics, practical matters like time and money also influence what you can study or how you are able to study it. In terms of time, your personal time frame for conducting research may be the length of the semester that you study research methods. Perhaps, one day your employer will give you an even shorter timeline in which to conduct some research—or perhaps longer. The length of time that a researcher is given to complete their work may depend on a number of factors and will certainly shape what sort of research they are able to conduct. In addition, money is also a relevant factor. For example, your ability to conduct research while living on a chartered sailboat in the Bahamas may be hindered unless you have unlimited funds or win the lottery. If you wish to conduct survey research, you may have to consider the potential costs of mailing paper surveys, including printing and postage. Interviewing people face to face may require that you offer your research participants a cup of coffee or glass of lemonade while you speak with them—and someone has to pay for the drinks.
In sum, feasibility is always a factor when designing a research project. Aspects of your own identity may play a role in determining what you can and cannot investigate, as will the availability of resources such as time and money.
Importance
Another consideration before beginning a research project is whether the question is important enough. Answering the question should be important enough for the researcher to invest the effort, time, and money often required to complete a research project. As we’ve discussed before, you should choose a topic that is both important to you and interesting enough that could enjoy learning about it for at least a few months. Your time and effort are your most precious resources, particularly when you are in school. Make sure you dedicate them to topics and projects you consider important.
Your research question should also be important and relevant to the scientific literature in your topic area. Scientific relevance can be a challenging concept to assess, but there are a few ways to think about your topic to understand if your question is likely important to the field. Let’s take an example: if your research aims to test the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in treating depression, then you are a little late to be asking that question, as hundreds of scientists have already published articles on this topic. If CBT interests you, perhaps you can apply it to a population for which it has not yet been proven effective, like older adults. Or, you could apply it to a social problem for which it has not yet been tested, like mobile phone addiction. Your project should have something new to say that we don’t already know. For a good reason, 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 we learn more about the social world by building off their findings. Ensure that your question will bring our scientific understanding of your topic to new heights.
If you do start to do some searching of prior literature and find that your question has already been answered (maybe a few times, maybe a few hundred times), it can be easy to feel defeated and scrap the question. That doesn’t have to be your response! You just need to think deeply about what is still not known about the topic as you read the prior literature you found. Pay special attention to their discussion sections, as most studies will include something about “future directions” and suggest other areas the research should be taken. You should also ask yourself what is not being said in the research you’re reading – are their voices not being represented? Perspectives that could be helpful? Other ways of defining or measuring something that might add to our understanding of the topic? These are the areas you might then explore with your revised research question! Be sure you have reason to go into the new area, though. Simply “it’s not been studied yet” is not a strong enough reason by itself, but “it’s not yet been studied and here’s why it’s still important” is much better. Think about the reasons we still need to know the missing information, and make that clear when you start writing up the justification for your research question.
Note that if you do go to do research for real, your study might require money to complete. In those cases, your reasoning and justification is even more important because you need to make the case for why your research is important enough to fund. Research grants can be as small as a few hundred dollars or as large as a multi-million-dollar grants. Scientists rarely fund their own research, so they must convince governments, foundations, and other organizations to support their research. Additionally, funders will likely have to align your research question to what your funders find important. In our previous example on CBT and older adults, you may want to seek funding from an Area Office on Aging or the American Association of Retired Persons. However, you will need to fit your research into their funding priorities or make the case that your study is important enough on its own merits. Perhaps the funding priorities are fitting for a study on treating depression, and your funders are interested in reducing suicides or increasing social connectedness. If you’re successful, funders become important stakeholders in the research process. Researchers must take great care not to create conflicts of interest in which the funder is able to dictate the outcome of the study before it is even conducted.
Refining Your Question
It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating: your question will likely continue to shift as you continue to read other research. You’ll get new insights, find what has been done, or encounter new reasoning. Don’t be afraid of this new information, and consider it critically as you refine your question. Return to the principles of good questions on this page to help make sure you stay within the realm of plausible questions, and also don’t hesitate to talk it over with experts (or, as described above, maybe with an AI assistant!).
Image attributions
Man-wearing-black-and-white-stripe-shirt-looking-at-white-printer-papers-on-the-wall by StartupStockPhotos CC-0
- Not familiar with SpongeBob SquarePants? You can learn more about him on Nickelodeon’s site dedicated to all things SpongeBob: http://www.nick.com/spongebob-squarepants/ ↵
- Focus on the Family. (2005, January 26). Focus on SpongeBob. Christianity Today. Retrieved from http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/januaryweb-only/34.0c.html ↵
- BBC News. (2005, January 20). US right attacks SpongeBob video. Retrieved from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4190699.stm ↵
- In fact, an MA thesis examines representations of gender and relationships in the cartoon: Carter, A. C. (2010). Constructing gender and relationships in “SpongeBob SquarePants”: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea. MA thesis, Department of Communication, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL. ↵
- Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ↵
- Think about Laud Humphreys’s research on the tearoom trade. Would he have been able to conduct this work if he had been a woman? ↵
