How can I use a research question framework to focus my research question?
Focused questions make it easier to plan research and find high quality evidence for a structured literature review. Your question may start unfocused.
Here is an example of how you can turn an unfocused question into a focused one:
- Unfocused: What is it like to take an online course?
- Focused: What are postgraduate student’s experiences of learning with students from other countries in an online course?
- Even more focused: What are the experiences of postgraduate students in the UK of learning with international students in online courses compared to in-person classes?
In this example we used framework prompts to:
- Clearly identify the group we are interested in like non-students, students, undergraduates, postgraduates, UK students, international students, students with disabilities or students with a certain age range.
- Cleary define what we want to study such as different types of courses - like online, blended learning, or courses that moved from in-person to online.
- Consider whether a comparison would be useful, and if so, explain what those comparisons are.
- Think about what kind of studies we want to look at. Such as, qualitative (personal experience), quantitative (numbers and statistics) or mixed methods (a combination of both)?
