Educational Research Methods
A site to support teaching and learning...
Research questions
RQ:
- follow from the literature review
- need to be focused such that they inform research design
- have to support the planning of a viable project
- that can be addressed by a feasible and ethical research design
- that matches the available resources
(This leads to a simple framework for analysing research questions).
The importance of getting research questions right:
Newby (2014) suggests that
"What is particularly important about research questions is that the way we phrase them can affect our approach to research. And this is why: research questions point us to the data we need and are also indicative of the methodology that will give us the data and process them." (p.67)
Newby, P. (2014). Research Methods for Education (Second ed.). Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge.
Newby also suggests that: "...we can 'break open' our research question and through this devise a model of the factors that we think may be influencing our research issue" (p.269). We might think that this rather reverses the logic - we want our research questions to reflect the model of factors we consider may be important (i.e. the conceptual framework we have constructed through our background reading, reflection, and possibly experience in the field).
“...research questions turn a general purpose or aim into specific questions to which specific, data-driven, concrete, answers can be given” (Cohen et al., 2011, p.111).
Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2011). Research Methods in Education (7th ed.). Routledge.
Some research questions are ‘compound’ in the sense that they actually encompass several subsidiary questions.
This is a personal site of Keith S. Taber to support teaching of educational research methods.
(Dr Keith Taber is Professor of Science Education at the University of Cambridge.)
“clear research questions do not seem to be established”
Critical comment from a peer review report of an article submitted for publication
“A rather fundamental problem is that the ...very aims of the study are not explicitly provided.”
Critical comment from a peer review report of an article submitted for publication
Research questions(RQ) play a pivotal role in a study, as they provide the key connections between
• the conceptual framework of the project
(as set out in the literature review)
• the research design
which sets out what is to be done and so what can possibly be found out
Taber, K. S. (2013). Classroom-based Research and Evidence-based Practice: An introduction (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
(See Taber, 2013, pp.41-42.)
