Developing Your Research Question

Identifying a research question is an important, and often highly challenging, stage in any research project. There are two main decisions that need to be made:

  • deciding on a topic
  • narrowing the topic down to a researchable question or set of questions

Learning activities that may be valuable are:

Further reading

Vandenbroucke, J. P., & Pearce, N. (2018). From ideas to studies: how to get ideas and sharpen them into research questions. Clinical Epidemiology, 10, 253–264. 

Although this article uses examples from medical research, the ideas and suggestions it offers about what to consider when you are thinking about a research question are very relevant for psychotherapy research

McCaslin, M.L. & Scott, K.W. (2003). The five-question method for framing a qualitative research study. The Qualitative Report, 8, 447–461. 

A simple, but useful format for thinking about different types of questions associated with different methodological traditions in qualitative research

Riva, J.,  Malik, K.M.P., Burnie, S.J., Endicott, A.R. & Busse, J.W. (2012). What is your research question? An introduction to the PICOT format for clinicians. Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association, 56, 167–171. 

A highly influential format for thinking about what is involved in constructing a research question that relates to evaluating the effectiveness of some kind of intervention