Library Guides: Political Science and International Studies: Research Question Development

Formulating a Research Question

Formulating a Research Question:

Research questions develop from a broad topic to a focused question. Often doing a preliminary search on a general topic is helpful in the development phase. It allows you to see what research as already been done. During the development phase, ask yourself open ended questions to help formulate a list of potential research questions:

Who: think in terms of demographics: gender, age, ethnicity, religious affiliation, identity, interests
What: think about concepts/aspects, socioological and political factors, relevant hot-topic issues, statistics, etc.
Where: compare/contrast location
Why/How/So What?: consider the topic's significance in relation to the reviewed articles, and weigh advantages vs. disadvantages

Research Question Development

Crafting Good Research Questions

Draw on background knowledge
Begin from empirical questions. Good questions are usually about the outcomes (what explains y?) rather than about the causes (what effects does x have?)
Utilize "reporter questions" to go beyond basic facts (who, what, when, where, why, how)
Do not have a single correct answer

Broad Topic	Sub-Topic	Narrowed Topic	Research Question
Voting	Voter Turnout	Impact of negative ads	What is the relationship between negative ads and voter turnout?
political attitudes	political attitudes of college students	Impact of peers on political attitudes of college students	How does peer to peer communication via social media impact the extent of undergraduate student's political information/knowledge?
Position Statements Position statements are argumentative points that support your topic. Take a stand, but more importantly these statements should be able to be backed up using evidence from journal articles.
Example: More evidence supports an inverse relationship between negative ads and voter turnout, in other words, when one goes down the other goes up.
Hypothesis Development A hypothesis is more specific than your positions and includes a quantitative correlation you wan to test. You should be able to answer the hypothesis through original research as you collect and analyze data.
Example: Analyzing the focus group interviews, 60% of respondents who were annoyed by negative ads during the Centerville 2019 election cycle did not vote in that election.

Empirical Rsearch

What Is Empirical Research?
Empirical research applies observation and experience as the main modes of gathering data. Characteristics include:

Content being based on actual and objective observation or experimentation
Findings published in scholarly or academic journals
5 main sections
- Introduction, including literature review
- Methodology
- Presentation of the results
- Discussion and/or conclusion
- References

Quantitative Research

What Is Quantitative Research?
This type of research emphasize objective measurements and the statistical, mathematical, or numerical analysis of data collected through polls, questionnaires, and surveys, or by manipulating pre-existing statistical data using computational techniques. The ultimate goal is to determine the relationship between one thing [an independent variable] and another [a dependent variable] within a population. Characteristics include:

Data usually gathered using structured research instruments
Results based on larger sample sizes that are representative of the population
Research study can usually be replicated or repeated, given its high reliability
Researcher has a clearly defined research question to which objective answers are sought
Data are in the form of numbers and statistics
Project can be used to generalize concepts more widely, predict future results, or investigate causal relationships

Credit for Research Question Development page

Contents of this page are Courtesy of Funderburg Library, Manchester University