Research papers are extremely important for uplifting your academic career. If you want to ensure your survival in an academic profession, you must publish several research papers in reputed journals in your field. But for writing a good research paper, the researcher should focus on research questions formulation techniques. There are many frameworks to form good research questions. But how to answer these research questions in a research paper is another interesting topic that many of you may look for. Thus, this article will discuss a few simple steps to writing a research question, some questions that you may consider while writing research questions, effective answers to research questions ways, and steps to clarify the research questions.
How Do You Write A Research Question For A Research Paper?
Research questions aim to explore the central theme of your research paper. For writing these questions, the researcher has to keep a few things in mind. These questions must be concise, focused, clear, complex, and arguable. For conciseness, you must write research questions in a few simple words. Clarity means that the reader can understand what you write without looking again and again at the research questions. When it comes to complexity, it does not mean using tough vocabulary, but here it demands research questions not to be answered through yes or no. It must include the synthesis and analysis of ideas for research. At last, the research questions should be arguable meaning that they must have open potential to debate.
The following are some steps to make research questions:
- Choose a narrow topic of interest
- Conduct preliminary research before selecting a topic of interest
- Specify your concerns and issues for the research paper
- Clear your perception of what you actually want to explore about a situation/ issue
- Reshape your points of investigation as questions
- Try to include different variables (dependent or independent) in each question
- Before starting a research, stop and ensure whether the questions are answerable or not
What Questions Do You Answer In A Research Paper?
In writing a research paper, the research questions are one of the most critical accept. The research questions’ structure, format, and tone vary greatly from discipline to discipline. Therefore, hiring a dissertation writing service becomes necessary for students. This is because there are a few questions that you can consider answering in a research paper. Before writing a research paper, you can answer the following questions:
- What topic should I choose for my research paper and why?
- What do I already know about the topic of interest?
- How can I narrow down my research focus?
- Is there any controversy about the topic? If yes, what is your own stance regarding the issue?
- Am I find anything interesting while gathering data?
- What new can I contribute to the existing research?
- What one real question my research paper should answer?
- And what cultural, social, geographical, and educational constraints I may face while writing a research paper?
Similarly, there are also a set of questions that you should answer after writing a research paper. Are all sections (introduction, literature, methods, findings, and conclusion) logically connected? Are all sources properly cited or referred to? Does a paper use any insignificant evidence? Is the purpose of writing a research paper clear? And many more.
How Do You Answer Research Questions In Research?
Most of the research paper writing guides primarily focus on the techniques and steps for writing research questions. But there are fewer guides that throw light on how we answer research questions in a research paper. Answers to research questions are indeed a tricky task in the writing process. It involves multiple research rounds, revision, data collection, evidence gathering, analysis, and interpreting techniques.
Moreover, answers to research questions in a research paper depend on the type of research paper. Research papers are of various types, including analytical research papers, survey papers, definition papers, argumentative research papers, cause and effect papers, experimental research papers, interpretative papers, compare and contrast papers, and argumentative (persuasive) research papers. Thus, depending upon the type of the research paper, the nature of research questions and their answering techniques also vary a lot like exploratory, relationship-based, descriptive, comparative, predictive, and interpretive questions.
Tips
- To answer the exploratory research question, you need to answer the what, how, and when aspects rather than Why.
- To answer the descriptive research questions, you have to answer what percentage, what time, how regularly, how much, what is, and other similar descriptive questions.
- You must compare and contrast two and more groups based on different dependent variables to answer the comparative research question.
- To answer the predictive research question, you can conduct an experiment, case study, and survey. The pattern analysis by either statistical or non-statistical tools helps in answering the predictive research questions.
- To answer the interpretive research questions, you can gather feedback on a specific concept and topic without manipulating the outcomes.
- To answer the relationship-based research question, we mostly perform experiments (in a controlled environment) to manipulate variables to see their relationship with other variables and the overall process.
Answers to research questions highly depend on the type of research questions in particular and research papers in general. The list of techniques we use to answer research questions goes beyond the scope of this article.
How Do You Clarify A Research Question?
In the research cycle, clarifying a research question must be the first step. Furthermore, the process to clarify the research questions further consists of a few simple steps like reviewing the journal or your supervisor’s instructions, brainstorming, and planning. First, clear your perception of your research paper. Second, think about whether the answers to research questions can meet your study requirements. Third, make a plan to find the most relevant information regarding answers to research questions. Also, you can get help from your colleagues and instructor in case you get puzzled at any research questions’ clarification step.
Consequently, you can follow a series of steps to write research questions. Likewise, using steps in precise answers to research questions clears some ways to effectively address your research problem. The research questions are pillars of research; thus, following proper answering ways can help improve the quality of your research paper.