Research Question

A research question is the central enquiry your study is designed to answer. It sets the scope of everything that follows — the literature you review, the design you choose, the data you collect and the claims you are entitled to make in your conclusion.

Good questions are specific, answerable within your resources, and grounded in a genuine gap. The wording signals the design: what and how many point to quantitative work, how and why point to qualitative work, and what is the effect of points to an experiment. Frameworks such as PICO in health research or FINER help test whether a question is workable.

Most theses use one main question supported by two to four sub-questions, each of which maps to a hypothesis or a strand of qualitative analysis. Check the alignment deliberately: every question should have a corresponding method and a corresponding section in your results chapter, with nothing orphaned on either side.