The Common Mistakes Students Make When Crafting Research Questions

Abstract

Developing an empirical research question is an incredibly challenging endeavor. While those who seek to perform research often have wide-ranging and passionate interests, crystallizing these interests into a theoretically sound and pragmatic research question is a daunting task:

But once you have chosen a general area to work in, picking a particular topic to research is difficult. This is the critical decision in doing research. It is also the most difficult aspect of research to teach anyone. It is at this step – seeing that a problem exists and that there is a good chance you can provide new insight into it—that originality and talent are most critical (Shively 2011, 21).

A multitude of textbooks on social science research methods provide detailed explanations about how to evaluate research questions using scientific and practical criteria. These explanations are usually supplemented with advice about how to locate a research question that meets these criteria. There is rarely any mention, however, of the specific challenges students face when devising a research question, particularly for an undergraduate or master’s thesis. This paper is a preliminary attempt to fill this void by enumerating some of these difficulties. While some criteria, such as devising a question that has real-world relevance, are relatively easy for students to meet, others, such as refraining from answering a normative question, pose a significant challenge. By illuminating the particular criteria that students find hardest to meet, this paper will (hopefully) serve as a useful resource for instructors of research methods and thesis advisors.