3.2.3: Forming Your Research Question

Forming Your Research Question

In Course 1, Lesson 2, you began the initial process of brainstorming research questions. We’ll begin this lesson by digging deeper into your ideas before narrowing down your final research question.

Let’s break down this process into three areas: your overall goal, your objectives, and the questions guiding your research. This helps you start broadly and work your way down to determining specifically how you will achieve your goal. Your overall goal is what you hope to accomplish with your research project. Your objectives can relate to the purpose of your study, your study population, or how you’ll shape your findingsResults The section of a research article where researchers share the results from the research. This section takes the results and directly connects them to the research questions or hypotheses posed at the start of the article. Also can be called “Findings.” . Clearly defining your goal and objectives will help to determine which questions will best fulfill your objectives and thus your overall goal. For example:

Overall Goal: How to best use active learning activities in online classes

Objectives: 1. To assess the effectiveness of active learning activities in online classes; 2. To describe the advantages and disadvantages of active learning activities in online classes from the student perspective

Research Questions: Do students in online classes with active learning activities perform better than those in traditional online classes? Do students in online classes with active learning activities have a higher level of learning engagement than those in traditional online classes? What are student perceptions of the content, length, and implementation of the active learning activities in online classes?

A research question should articulate what you are seeking to study and determine what kind of data you need to collect for the study. The following list includes different types of research questions:

• Descriptive questions: seek to describe an observed social phenomenon and find out “what is happening” or “what exists”
• Relationship questions: aim to examine the correlation between two or more variables
• Causality questions: seek to determine whether/to what degree one or more variables causes or affects one or more outcome variables

Take a look at the research question ideas you came up with in Course 1, Lesson 2’s Brainstorming Research Questions activity, or go back in your LPOL workbook to fill that out now. If you’re still having trouble finding a preliminary question to start from of interest to you, there are many approaches to identify a topic area or focused topic of interest. Some include:

• When narrowing is difficult, consider Stuit and Thielen’s (2019) post with suggestions like searching for collaborators and reflecting on how your work strengths resonate with research strengths.
• Examine your work mindfully for questions that might also point to research questions (see Zoe Bastone’s 2019 Library Parlor article).
• Start with a patron population and narrow down studies about library services that might help that population (see Brittany Fielder and Chelsea Heinbach’s 2018 LibParlor article).
• Consider the presentations you attend and articles you read and think about how to apply those to amplify the voices of underserved users or colleagues (see Rebecca Halpern’s 2018 LibParlor article or try a copy of her worksheet).
• Consider personal areas of interest and harness your desire to document a need for improvement or build a path toward change (see Katie Manwiller’s 2020 LibParlor article).
• If you find a big hole in LISLibrary and Information Science An interdisciplinary field that examines how physical and digital information is organized, accessed, collected, managed, disseminated and used, particularly in library settings. discussions instead of a little gap, see what other disciplines have written and focus your research on bringing it across disciplines (see Gail Betz’s 2019 LibParlor article). More about gap analysis will be discussed in Course 4.

Evaluate your questions using the following prompts:

• Can the research question hold my interest?
• If someone were to ask “so what,” is my research question strong enough to prove its usefulness?
• Is the research question well-grounded in existing research?

Activity

Complete the following activity in your LPOL Workbook. This activity will help you work toward a final curriculum deliverable, and it will help you develop your overall research plan.

Using the framework introduced above, write out your own outline using the Using the framework introduced above, write out your own outline using the 3.2.3: Refining Your Research Question worksheet in your LPOL workbook:

• What is the overall goal for your research?
• What are your objectives for doing this research?
• What are the questions guiding this research that you hope to answer?

Use this time to play around with different versions of this outline and look at them side-by-side. Next, we’ll work on how to narrow down your final research question.