Steps to firm up on academic research project's research questions: a note

Steps to firm up on academic research project's research questions: a note

From time to time, some students, having attended my brief lecture session on research methods, come to me and ask whether their research topics as well as preliminary research objectives/ questions are good enough or not. Most of the time, those research topics and questions are not good enough. The problem is, it is important to do some preliminary research efforts and learning reflection before a reasonably proper research topic and research objective/ question can be formulated. Here, I offer the following steps for students to employ in order to do so properly for research projects that are academic in orientation:

Step 1: Come up with a broad research theme (e.g. for housing studies, research themes could be homelessness, housing affordability, etc.; for accounting and finance students, research themes can be capital structure, dividend policy, etc.) that is associated to your field of study: for accounting and finance students, the research theme needs to be related to accounting and finance; and for housing studies students, the research theme needs to be associated with housing studies.

Step 2: Perform a research gap analysis (as a preliminary literature review exercise) as well as a preliminary desk research to identify some of the main research gaps as well as practical concerns as related to your chosen research theme.

Step 3: Informed by your additional knowledge gained from step 2, start to formulate your specific research topic, research objective and research questions. To do so, consider your personal intellectual strengths and interests. You also need to contextualize your preliminarily formulated research topic, research objective(s) and research question(s) so as to further refine them. The research context comprises the (i) time (e.g. Spring of 2023), (ii) place (e.g. Hong Kong) and (iii) people (e.g. certain stakeholder group for a particular business sector with specific concerns) dimensions

Step 4: Roughly review whether you are able to employ specific research methods to investigate your chosen topic, objective(s) and question(s).

After performing these four steps, you should be in a good position to determine whether your research topic, research objective(s) and research question(s) are proper or not (e.g. being clear in meaning and having some concrete research topic originality). Now, you could also ask your research methods lecturer and research project supervisor for their opinion on the appropriateness of your project topic, objective(s) and question(s).

The main point is: do not start to formulate research objective and questions without some preliminary literature review and desk research efforts.