Research Problem

and
Research Questions
The ultimate goal of the research
is not only to propose ways of
studying things, people, places,
and events, but also to discover
and introduce new practices,
strategies, or techniques in
solving a problem.
The word “problem”
makes you worry and
pushes you to exert
considerable effort in
finding a solution for it.
When you decide to do
research, you begin with a
problem that will lead you to
a specific topic to focus on.
 Background of the problem
Spend time getting background
knowledge abou the problem that
triggered off your research topic to
discover its relation to what the
world, particularly, the experts,
professionals, and learned people
know about the topic.
Research Questions
• The research problem enables
you to generate a set of research
questions.
• Your ability to identify your
research problem and to
formulate the questions depends
on the background knowledge
you have about the topic.
To get a good idea of the
problem, you must have rich
background knowledge about the
topic through the RRL (Review
of Related Literature, which
requires intensive reading about
your topic.
Research questions aim at
investigating specific aspects of the
research problem.

Any method or technique of

collecting, collocating, and
analyzing data specified by the
research design depends greatly on
the research questions.
 Guidelines in
Formulating Questions
1.Establish a clear
relation between the
research questions and
the problem or topic.
2. Based your research questions
on your RRL because existing
published works help you get
good background knowledge of
the research problem.
3. Formulate research
questions that can arouse
your curiosity and
surprise you with your
discoveries and findings.
4. State your research
questions in such a way
that they include all
dependent and
independent variables.
5. Let the set of research
questions or sub-problems
be preceded by one
question expressing the
main problem of the
research
6. Avoid asking research
questions that are
answerable with “yes” or
“no” and use the how
questions only in a
qualitative research.
7. Be guided by the
acronym SMART.