First steps in research 3

Maree K

• Publisher: Van Schaik Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780627037092
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

A theoretical and practical guide on how to conduct and report on research at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Uses the most current perspectives in the field, both locally and internationally, to facilitate the understanding and application of theories, goals, methods and strategies. Aimed at scholars, academics, researchers, and Master's and doctoral students who are conceptualising and conducting research.

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What is a research question and why is it important?

Jonathan D. Jansen

OUTCOMES FOR THIS CHAPTER

After studying this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• State reasons why researchers need research questions
• Describe qualities of good research questions
• Identify criteria that mark good research questions
• Illustrate the differences between research questions and interview questions
• Give examples of poor and good research questions, and of main and subsidiary questions 2

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Any research – be it a small independent study for an organisation, a mini-research project for an undergraduate class or a formal thesis or dissertation for a higher degree – stands or falls by the quality of the research question.1 Research questions should be original, and research should not have been conducted on your specific research question before. Moreover, the research question should be clear and focused, and many literature sources should be integrated to help you formulate your distinctive question (What makes a good research question? 2014). The research question identifies the phenomenon you wish to study (The relationship between the research question, hypotheses, specific aims, and longterm goals of the project, 2003). It should, typically, appear right at the beginning of your research report since the research question is the single most important measure of whether your research is sound or not. Identifying and formulating a research question is very difficult – as will become clear in this chapter – and it is a useful investment of time to make sure that the research question you choose is a good one. But before you dive into your research question, it might be useful to think about the broader problem statement under which the question(s) will fall.

The problem statement in research

Before posing a specific research question, it is useful to state what the research is about. Consider the following:

• My research sets out to determine the relationship between class size and student achievement in primary school education in developing countries.

Note that the statement clarifies the key variables in this study, namely, class size (the independent variable) and student achievement (the dependent variable). Note also that the problem statement specifies the level of schooling for the inquiry – primary school education. The specification is done on purpose because the nature of the relationship between the variables does seem to vary from early primary education to high school education, for example. It is important to notice that the statement delimits the context for the investigation – developing countries. This is also done on purpose since there is likely to be a difference in student achievement outcomes depending on the levels of resources available in relation to rich versus poor nations, for instance.

While the problem statement clarifies the broad direction of the research, you still need a specific research question(s) that indicates what it is about the relationship between class size and student achievement you wish to investigate. Asking a good question does not come easily. 3

The habit of asking good questions

It is difficult to ask good questions in research if you are not in the habit of asking good questions in life. Everyday life brims with puzzles. Young children especially are intrigued by life’s puzzles and are in the habit of constantly asking questions. How do birds know to fly south for the winter? Where do we come from? Why do people float in space? Are we alone in the universe?

As you grow older, there are still as many questions as in childhood. Why is there so much poverty in otherwise rich nations? Why do young people knowingly engage in high-risk sexual behaviour? What happens when we die?

Similarly, educational researchers occupy themselves with hundreds of questions that defy simple explanation. Here are a few:

• Do smaller classes lead to higher gains in student achievement?
• Why, in most societies, do more girls than boys drop out of high school?
• How do successful principals organise their schools?

In this chapter I introduce students who wish to embark on small or large research projects to the art of identifying and posing a good research question.

Some of the issues concerning research questions that I address in this chapter are the following:

• Why research questions are important
• The features of good research questions
• How you will know whether you have a good research question
• How research questions differ from field questions (such as interview questions)
• What constitutes examples of poor and good research questions
• The different categories of research questions
• The difference between main research questions and subsidiary (secondary) research questions
• The iterative nature of research questions
• The global character of research questions

1.2 WHY DO YOU NEED A RESEARCH QUESTION?

The research question specifies what intrigues you and focuses on what you will study. It becomes the beacon that guides you over months or even years of research as you strive to find answers to this thing called “the research question”. In practical terms, you need a research question for at least two reasons.

Your research question should never be used to enable you to “prove” something. It merely directs you to appropriate research literature and other resources. Your question tells you what research literature to read and how to narrow down your bibliographic search. For example if you are researching the question “How do successful principals organise their schools?” then you are likely to focus only on the literature concerned with school leadership and management rather than 4 the literature on learning styles or models of teaching. This helps the research librarian. If you come in and say, “I am interested in studying how successful principals organise their schools”, she or he then has a clear idea of where to direct you in the library stacks or on the internet or the specialist periodical shelves. Without a clear question, you could waste valuable time tracking down the appropriate literature pertinent to your study.

A good research question provides you with a focus for your data collection. It prevents you from drifting from your original purpose and keeps you focused on your starting interest. This does not mean you should slavishly follow your research question irrespective of what you find in the course of your inquiry; often your work in the field collecting data might throw up other or related questions of interest that you could not have imagined when you started the research. You might then either wish to modify or discard your original research question or questions. However, be conscious of the fact that every time you drift into other questions there is a loss of time and resources and you may well get so distracted that you never get to finish your original research project. All the more reason to ensure that you start with a strong research question.

For these and many other reasons, it is especially important that the researcher gets the research question right. You could waste valuable time and resources pursuing something only to find out much later that you started off, right at the beginning, with a weak research question. What, then, is a good research question?

1.3 WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES OF A GOOD RESEARCH QUESTION?

A good research question has many different features and ten of these are described briefly below. Consider the following research question:

Do smaller classes lead to greater gains in student achievement?

Using the above example, notice that a good research question is the following:

1. Concise. It comes to the point, focuses sharply on the issue of interest, and is stated in a cogent and specific way. In the example, the research question is posed in one sentence and in one line.
2. Clear (unambiguous). It leaves no doubt as to what is being proposed for study; it is understandable by even non-specialists (in this case, those outside the field of educational research); it does not require further explanation.
3. Operationalisable. It can be executed or implemented in practice. In the example, the researcher simply has to find measures of class size and measures of student achievement – and then determine the relationship between them. In other words, such a study is reasonably easy to implement.
4. Open-ended. It is posed in a way that suggests no obvious answer; it is therefore intellectually honest, and does not expect or lean towards an obvious answer. It could be that small classes (with few students) produce higher test 5results (the most common way to measure achievement), but we do not know for sure. A good question therefore lacks bias and allows for any kind of result to emerge from the study.
5. Elegant. It is posed simply and yet in a way that is parsimonious (limited words) and conveys rich meaning. In the above example, the research question asks about a relationship between only two variables – class size (the number of students in a class) and student achievement (academic performance). It is as simple and elegant as that.
6. Timely. It is a mark of a good question that it addresses some pressing issues of importance at the time. The implementation of a new curriculum needs to be understood; the attitudes of teachers towards a new policy making corporal punishment illegal needs to be probed; the growing levels of violence in schools need to be theorised about; and so on. Of course, some research questions are timeless and some might not address an immediate practical need but speak to a long-standing intellectual puzzle.
7. Theoretically rich. It leads to other questions. It can be compared to peeling an onion: you discover that there are many more layers to the onion as you go deeper. Does class size matter at all, or is there a lower and upper limit of numbers in a class before size starts to impact on student achievement? Are some teachers better at teaching large classes than others? Does it not matter who is in the class – such as children from poor families or children...