Research Questions: The Heart of Inquiry

Research questions are the engines that drive your research plan. They are the specific queries you aim to answer in order to address the research problem and achieve your objectives. Formulating effective research questions is a structured process. Here's how to do it:

Creating Clear Research Questions

1. Align to Objectives: Begin by aligning your questions with your defined research objectives. Each question should correspond to an objective, ensuring that your research remains on course.
2. Prioritize by Impact: Identify questions that are high-impact and relatively easy to answer with confidence. This helps in focusing your efforts and minimizes uncertainty.
3. Get to Know Them: Understand the nature of your questions. Are they exploratory, explanatory, generative, or evaluative in nature? Do they probe into motivations and mindsets or behaviors? Define any ambiguous terms with quantifiable terms where possible.

Types of Questions to Avoid

1. Leading Questions: Avoid questions that lead respondents to specific answers. Leading questions can limit exploration and result in biased responses. For example, instead of asking, "Why did you have difficulty with the navigation?" you could ask, "Tell me about your experience with the navigation?"
2. Yes/No Questions: Steer clear of yes/no questions, especially when you seek qualitative feedback. Open-ended questions provide more context and valuable insights. For instance, instead of asking, "Do you have a laptop?" you could ask, "Describe your technology setup."
3. Future-Oriented Questions: Focus on past or present behavior and experiences rather than future behavior. For instance, instead of asking, "How would you complete task A?" you could ask, "How do you complete task A? Or take me through how you complete Task A."
4. Double-Barreled Questions: Avoid questions that combine two queries in a single sentence, as they can lead to confusion in responses. For example, instead of asking, "What do you think of the quality of the product and its speed?" you could ask, "What do you think of the quality of the product? What do you think of the speed of the product?"

Sample Questions

Now that you understand the principles of effective research questions and types to avoid, here are some sample questions that align with our research problem and the objective "Identify reasons patients may not be taking medications", notice how everything rolls up into our original research problem:

1. "How would you describe your adherence to prescribed medications?"
2. "What factors influence your adherence to prescribed medications?"
3. "What barriers have you encountered in following your medication regimen?"
4. "What strategies could MedHealth implement to improve your medication adherence?"

Conclusion

Well-crafted research questions guide you toward insightful findings and informed decisions. By following the principles of aligning questions with objectives and avoiding common pitfalls, you ensure that your research inquiries yield valuable and unbiased results.

In the next article, we'll talk about the importance of participant selection.