Where do ideas for research questions come from?

One of the problems you may face at the beginning of a research project is whether you should design research questions before the literature review, or should you use the literature as a source of ideas for research questions. Let's assume that you are very interested in the following issue: Why do young Poles refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19? This is a fairly specific question. How about changing our imaginary situation: Suppose that you are interested in the problem of vaccination, but you do not know what to focus on. Should you concentrate on a comparison between countries in terms of vaccination coverage? Or maybe on a country's policy of encouraging vaccination? In such a situation, the study of literature will be helpful in finding out what has already been written on this topic, what has been researched and what is worth paying attention to. In fact, in both cases the best solution seems to be to find the “happy medium”: although, a literature review can help you identify interesting and relevant social problems, at the same time it is difficult to clearly define what books, articles or reports you should read if you do not have a clear question in your mind to guide your activities.

It is worth starting with an initial attempt to design a research question(s). At the beginning, research questions can be quite general and vague (a topic discussed in more detail later), because contrary to appearances, asking the right question is a form of art. Moreover, a properly asked question sets the next stages of the research process. That’s why it is good to have at least a tentative idea of what you are looking for!

Research question or research questions?

Researchers use different styles to inform the reader about their research questions. Note, however, that depending on the scope of the project (and depending on your organizational, financial, and time capabilities...), the number of research question can vary from one to many. You can also divide them into main research question(s) (usually one or two) and corollary questions (in some cases, the answer to these questions is necessary to answer the main question). Make sure that all these questions are relevant to the research problem and that they can be researched! What does it mean? Suppose you are interested in the ideal candidate profile for service in the Internal Security Agency. You would like to explore the career paths of people who have recently (for example, in the last year) been hired. The project is very interesting, but is it feasible? You will not be able to find publications on this topic, but also probably no one will disclose such data to you, because it is classified. (We will discuss more examples of non-researchable questions later.)

Now you know why not all research problems and not all answers may be within your reach. You should always make sure that you will be able to answer the question, whether by collecting your own quantitative or qualitative data or by analyzing the literature on the subject. If it turns out that access to data is impossible, then you will have to rethink your research question.