Hi I'm James Arvanitakis. I'm the Dean of the Graduate Research School here
at Western Sydney University. One of the biggest challenges you face when you're
doing your PhD or your Masters by Research is trying to finalise your research
questions. I mean actually getting a research area that you're interested in
is quite easy. We know what we're passionate about, you know you might be
passionate about say looking into soil, or it might be street art, or it might be
citizenship or something like human rights, but it's actually taking
that broad area and defining it down into a research topic and having
actually very very clear research questions which is really really
difficult. So in this very short video I'm going to get you to think about what
research questions are and how you go about defining them. So what are research
questions. Well research questions are usually two or three very clear
questions which guide your research. If you've got six or ten or twelve research
questions, that's way too many. If you have three research questions with three
sub-questions under each question, that's too many as well. They should be simple and
straightforward and clearly direct where you're going. So how do you know if you've got a good
research question. Well the first thing is that a clear research question will
guide your research. It will tell you if you're going in the right direction. So
a vague research question means that you've opened up the area so broad that you
really don't know which way to go.
A research question should be clear and focused, it should also synthesize and present
your argument and as I said it should not be too vague or too tight and that
way
being focused is the key. Ok so let's get a little bit interactive on this video. I want you to pause this
video as you're watching it, and what I want to do is after you pause it, is write
down what you think are your broad research questions
Pick three, just no more than two or three, write them down. They should only be
a line or two each, and see
and see what you come up. So pause me now and try that.
Okay so you've written down your research questions. Now go back to the criteria I
said before, being clear and focused, being quite simple and directed and not
being too vague or too tight. Do your three research questions meet those
criteria. If they do, fantastic, you're definitely on the right path. If they
don't, if they're too broad or they're not clear or they're too wordy, or they're too
vague
then obviously you need to go back and redraft them, and this is key.
Without a clear research question you're likely to get lost undertaking your research
project. So one thing about research questions is they don't appear in lightbulb
moments. It's not like you're sitting there, you know,
brushing your teeth, or having a cup of coffee and all of a sudden you go I know
exactly what my research question is. Research questions actually emerge
slowly. They emerge through discussion, they emerge through revision, they emerge through ongoing
engagement and that's a really important part. What you need to do with your research
questions, is after you have them, you need to kind of
socialise them. That means you need to discuss them. Discuss them with your
supervisor, your supervisor panel. Discuss them with other PhD or Masters students,
discuss them with other academics. Just work through and see what they
say, they may ask you questions, and if those questions throw you or indicate
that you're not in the right direction then you go back and you
revise them and that's the key thing about research questions. While at the
beginning of your project, you draft them, as you continue your project
especially in the first year you probably need to go back and
re-edit them, re-engage with them and re-define them, and it's actually a process
of getting them right, and you should be about halfway through your project, is
about when you actually should have really really solid research questions.
So how do you know if you get your research questions right? That's a really hard one,
but as I said one of the things to do is immerse yourself with other people, socialise
them, keep on asking people. If you go to a conference and you hear a researcher
or a presenter who's doing a similar thing to you, go over and tell them what your
broad area of research is. See what they say.
Engage in conversations with them. Take part on online forums and as I said your
supervisor and supervisory panel is probably the best source for this type
of thing. The other thing to know if you've got them right is to immerse yourself in the
literature. As you begin to read, and the more and the more you read, your research
questions will not only guide your reading but your reading should
actually go back and help you redefine your research questions. Help you get
them right, because as you immerse yourself in that literature, you
actually discover if you're going down that right track and if you've actually got
research questions which other people haven't responded to. So a few things to
think about when you have your research questions written out in front of you.
The first thing, is it too general or too vague. That is, is it too broad. With a very
broad research question you're likely to not have the direction which research
questions are there to give to you and that goes back right to the beginning of
the video when I said there's a difference between having a broad
research area, which we can easily define, and actually having a focused
research project. Now this process of actually immersing yourself in the
literature and talking to other research and focusing your research questions is
a process known as progressive focusing. So make sure that as you
continue, you progressively focus your research questions. But in saying that
and saying get them right and get them progressively focused,
avoid getting them too narrow. There's a risk that if you focus your research questions too
narrowly then you miss a broad level of research and that's really
important, if you just focus it too narrowly then you don't know what you're missing
out on, so there's a balance here between being broad enough to immerse yourself
in that field but not too broad so you are directionless. The third thing about
your research question you should be asking yourself is will this facilitate
knowledge. Don't forget the role of undertaking an original research
project, be it a PhD or a Masters, is to actually facilitate the emergence of new
knowledge. It could be applying an established theory into a new area, you
could be discovering something new, it could be testing something in a
different way, but you must ask are your research questions going to facilitate
this new knowledge which meets the minimum requirement for you to actually
achieve your PhD or your Masters. The fourth thing about a research question you
should think about is, is it doable? When I first started my PhD my research question was
redesigning the global economy.
It didn't take me long to figure out that that research question, well how do you
redesign the global economy, was not a doable research question.
It was way too vague and much too ambitious for a three-year project.
So that's the other question, is it doable? The final thing to say about the research
questions is that the way they're framed should indicate your overall research design and
research methodology. For example, one of my research areas is understanding young
people's relationships with democracy. So the research question is how do we understand
young people's attitudes to contemporary democratic processes. Now that question
indicates that I'm interested in understanding attitudes. The attitudes indicate that
my research design will be qualitative, I'll be undertaking interviews. If I started
actually aiming to do quantitative surveys that contrasted, contradicted in fact, what I
wanted to do in my research question. So your design and your actual methodologies
and your research questions should line up. So that's about it really, there is no magic
ingredient to finding the perfect research question. It's a process of as I
said progressive focusing, but don't forget there's some basic guidelines and those
guidelines are that the research question should be guiding your research,
the research questions should be clear and focused, you should have no more than
two or three and they should synthesize and present your unique argument,
and finally remember that your research questions should align with your
methodology and your broader research design. So good luck.
Thankyou.