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Research Skills

Choosing a Question

questionDeciding on the question to investigate and narrowing it down sufficiently can take a look of thought. You can easily let this take up too much of the time you have for completing the project, reducing the amount of time you have left to research and write up!

The best place to start is with your existing knowledge of a topic or subject area and decide on a specific question you want to explore. The question should be relevant to some aspect of the subject, but also be something that interests you.

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It is very important to be clear about what you are setting out to do, and not to be too ambitious. If you start from an interest in a broad issue, such as social history - example: 'how independent broadcasting has developed' - you need to narrow this down to a more precise enquiry that is manageable within the time and word limits set for the project.

One way of doing this is to take a case-study approach. In the case of the example, you could focus your enquiry mainly on a particular independent broadcasting company, such as London Weekend Television (LWT). Your topic would then be 'The development of London Weekend Television Company'.

But it is a lot more helpful if you actually turn the enquiry into a question rather than a topic heading - example: 'What factors influenced the development of LWT?'. The question focuses your research by forcing you to seek out some 'answers' to it. You now know that you will need to analyse the factors involved and explain and justify your conclusions. Just using the topic heading makes it all too easy to meander around the issues in a rather aimless way and, ultimately, find yourself on the receiving end of the project marker's most common complaints: 'Failed to relate project work to the wider context. Didn't use the information - too descriptive, not enough analysis and explanation.'

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Focusing your research

Whatever subject you are interested in - music, art, literature, a particular period/place (e.g. Classical Rome), science, etc. - you must try to define a 'do-able' project for yourself. If you are comparing the work of two composers or novelists, for instance, you cannot hope to look at all their work. And you cannot explore every aspect of an historical period, or of its art or literature. You have to be selective. But how do you know what to select, what to focus on?

This is where your knowledge of the broad subject-area comes in. When you are fairly familiar with a subject you know what the important questions and debates are within it. These are what your research enquiry should contribute to in some way.

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If you're struggling to come up with a question, try reading around your subject or talking to other people, such as teachers, friends, family, etc. about it. Write down a few potential ideas and turn them into questions to see how you feel about them.

While you are reading around the subject, and the question you will explore is being narrowed down or taking shape, you need to make some preliminary enquiries into what resources are available to you. Check in the ILC, local libraries, online, journals, newspapers, magazines, etc. If you cannot easily get hold of some reliable sources (primary and secondary) then you will have to re-define the enquiry and make changes to your research question.

For the LWT example above, it might be difficult to get hold of the kinds of internal reports, papers and memos that document the company's development and may be held in a private archive. It is certainly likely that you will need to seek permission to view these as soon as possible. You will also need to access government reports and back issues of newspapers that provide context, etc. It would be important to make sure that this kind of information is in some accessible form before you begin.

If you ask, you may find you can use the reference section of any university library, and our ILC sometimes has University of Surrey borrowing cards, so ask a librarian for more information. The ILC or your local library may be able to get books in for you, for example through interlibrary loan schemes.

It is important to remember that you should try and look for primary as well as secondary resources. If primary source material turns out to be too difficult or impossible to access, then you may need to alter your plans.

Making these kinds of enquiries early on, and before you commit to a question or start writing, enables you to change the direction of your work before you have invested too much time in the project.

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To sum up choosing a question:

  • pick a subject you are familiar with and enjoy;
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  • turn the topic into a question which will expand your knowledge;
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  • if you are struggling to narrow down a question, read around the subject, talk it through with peers, and make a list of possible questions you can then pick from;

and 

  • check that you can find suitable sources to help you answer the question before you spend too much time on it.

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qaQuick Activity

Have a go at evaluating and improving some project titles in this worksheet. For each title, make a note of what could go wrong and how it could be improved.

This is an essential activity, so you can upload your completed worksheet if you wish.

You can upload your completed worksheet either as a Word document, typed on screen, or as a pdf scan of your handwritten answers.

Research Skills - Choosing a Question Worksheet Upload your completed worksheet here

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Here are a couple more sheets from other people on the best way to choose a good research question:

Writing Studio - What makes a good research question? Includes a checklist to help you decide if your question is good.

Researchable questions and getting to a 'right' answer! Particularly useful if your project is scientific.

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Information on this page was adapted from Chambers, E. & Northedge, A., The Arts Good Study Guide, 1997, The Open University, Chapter 6, Section 8.1, pages 226-228