Developing research questions

Morrison, Jill (2002). Developing research questions in medical education: the science and the art. Medical Education. 36(7):596-597.

This article got very specific on the issues of defining research questions.  If you do not ask the right question then regardless of the measurements and results the answers found might be totally useless.

A related study found that research lacking a sound clear problem statement was the 2nd most common problem cited.   This included no problem statement at all, nothing focused, misleading statements and.or totally inappropriate statements.  The article started with a statement that the journal rejects 75% of the articles submitted.  40% are simply poor science while the remaining 35% fall into three catagories:

1. not original, old news not worth publishing.
2. no general interest, not providing suitable information that readership will respond to.
3. no international relevance, self explanatory.

Thus having a good question is critical.  In this article Morrison spoke about how to define the research questions and then how to check to see if it is worth investigating at all and to define if it has not been investigated already.  It started with a very basic formula.  If we have a problem to investigate we will begin with these six basic questions:

1. who
2. what
3. where
4. why
5. when
6. how

From this list everything else follows.  The formula she used was very simple.  First we select the question above that we really want to get answered.  Then we phrase the question to answer all the other six components, leaving only one for the research question.  Like the problem with blogging?  How does it teach us anything?  That is a place to start where my question is only interested in item number 6 above, so let's try this:

HOW  do students (the who) learn good writing skills (the what) in the expository writing class (the where) by publishing their work (the why) before graduating (the when) ???

For this question above I started with "HOW" from my question about the blogging problem then filled in the sentence in the order above answering all the other questions listed.  So How (6) is what I wanted to know while (1-5) were covered in the question statement itself.  That represents a neat little formula for getting very specific on the research question.  This is not everything we need to begin research yet, because we now need to test the question to see if it will result in anything useful.  For this we check to see if it meets all of these:

1. Interest - is anyone interested in the answer?  If it takes 3 years of research to get the answer do you think it will still be interesting for you?
2. Importance - is it something that will be valuable to anyone?  If you still care in 3 years, what about 10 years?  Will it matter to anyone then?
3. Generalizability - is it something that applies to anyone else?  Will the results help in any other situation beyond the one example you are exploring?
4. Feasible - is it even possible to test and measure this?  What does it cost to get meaningful results and suitable measurements to come to any conclusion?  Is 3 years enough?  What if it will take 30 years?  What is the point then?

Now let me explore this a bit more "How do students learn good writing skills in the expository writing class by publishing their work before graduating???"

1. Interest?  Yes, I am interested, I want to know if bloggin is a suitable means, as I am sure we all do in this class!  Many teachers might like to know too.  Most bloggers are online for their own reasons, but I'm sure there are many who are trying to learn something or share something, beyond just writing skills.
2. Important?   Yes, I need to know how to learn good writing skills.  Or I'm wasting my time writing and wasting my time trying to publish. Good writing is necessary if I'm venturing into a career and graduate program to research and publish insights.
3. Generalizable?  Sound writing skills is something the whole population should possess, especially in academia. 
4. Feasible?  Well it is easy to study whether this research is feasible.  I guess we could have a class survey at the end.  Do you write better after the class?  We 'll see!  I'm sure someone knows, as this class has been taught before!