4. Research Questions
Designing a new study can seem daunting, especially after you’ve read studies by professional sociologists. With all of the details to consider, and all of the things that can go wrong, how can you put together a feasible and potentially useful study? It’s important to remember that the design of a study evolves over time, and you typically won’t get it right in the first draft. Doing research is a marathon, not a sprint, and you want to focus on a single step at a time, knowing that as long as you’re making incremental progress, you’ll eventually reach your destination. We also want to emphasize how the planning process for a scientific study—what we call research design—tends to be long and involved. Social scientists are expected to do a lot of background reading and thinking about their research before they start collecting or analyzing data to any substantial degree. Unlike journalists, social scientists don’t usually work on tight daily deadlines, and they take the time to ensure that their work truly builds on existing knowledge.
You will start the research design process by developing an interesting research question, the question you are trying to answer by collecting and analyzing data for your study. This chapter will focus on strategies for how to go about generating a good research question. We want to start off, however, by giving you a road map for the design of your study and showing you how your research question matters in the planning you’ll be doing. Indeed, your initial choice of a research question will shape all other aspects of your proposed study. And as you revise that question, your plans for your data collection and analysis will undoubtedly change, too. That’s normal for research design, and it is one of the reasons why the design process takes so long: you want to be confident that all the time and energy you put into a project will ultimately pay off.
Here is an outline of what the stages in research design might look like. We have also included the chapters in the textbook that will discuss each of these stages:
- Develop an initial research question—what is called a working research question, given that it is a work in progress (Chapter 4: Research Questions)
- Decide on an overall research strategy—whether your analytical approach will be inductive or deductive, what the target population is, and so on. (Chapter 4: Research Questions)
- Conduct a literature review to identify a gap in the existing body of research (a research problem) and refine your research question (Chapter 5: Research Design)
- Decide on a method of data collection and analysis (Chapter 5: Research Design and the chapters devoted to each method)
- Propose hypotheses based on your literature review (Chapter 5: Research Design)
- Decide on your sampling strategy (Chapter 6: Sampling)
- Define key concepts and measures—what is called conceptualization and operationalization, respectively (Chapter 7: Measuring the Social World)
- Identify and address any ethical concerns about your proposed study (Chapter 8: Ethics)
Please note that the stages of research design we’ve just described do not necessarily have to follow this order. For instance, you may have a good idea of the sample of research participants you want to recruit for your study well before you know the specific questions you’ll ask of them. Also, you will continually move back and forth between steps—for example, between reading previous studies on your topic and further revising your research question, and between refocusing your research question and rethinking the ways you measure your variables. Nevertheless, at some point you will need to address all these stages of research design.
In this chapter, we’ll start off by discussing ways of generating and refining a research question. We’ll also cover different types of research questions, which roughly correspond to different types of data collection and analysis. Throughout the process of developing your research question, you want to be reviewing the existing studies on your topic, which is the best way to clarify and sharpen your question. This reading of previous research—what we call the academic literature—needs to happen throughout the research design process (and should continue even beyond it, to help make sense of your study’s findings). We discuss how to write a literature review in Chapter 5: Research Design, but even after you move on to that stage, we advise you to keep revising your research question, using the advice in this current chapter to connect your question more clearly and creatively to the existing body of scientific knowledge on your topic.
Opening chapter image credit: Olena Bohovyk, via Pexels. Adapted by Bizhan Khodabandeh.
The planning process for a scientific study, which typically involves a thorough review of the relevant literature, the formulation of a focused research question, and a detailed proposal for the methodological approach that will be used to answer that question.
The question a researcher hopes to answer by collecting and analyzing data for an empirical study.
An initial research question that a researcher develops to guide the design of their study and its early phases.
A gap in the literature on a topic that scholars who work in that area aim to address with their research.
The stage of the research process at which researchers explicitly and clearly define the concepts they are using in their study.
The stage of the research process at which the researcher specifies explicitly and clearly how a concept will be measured.
The existing scientific studies that relate to a particular phenomenon.
