Choosing a research topic can be hard. You might know what topic you want to explore, but what specifically do you want to investigate and why? If you’re stuck, ask yourself, “what questions do I want to answer?” Below we explore three kinds of research questions and how to go about developing a study to answer them. 

1. Exploratory questions: Researchers ask these questions when a topic is not well documented or researched, i.e. “What’s going on here?” These are often the first questions asked by researchers in the brainstorming process. Often, they start by looking at what is known and unknown. For example, if researchers want to know more about high school Unified sports coaches, they may first look for research on high school sports coaches, or research on inclusive sports teams before asking more specific research questions like, “What is it like being a high school Unified sports coach?” or “How does coaching Unified sports compare to coaching non-inclusive sports?”  These questions are often flexible and change over the course of the study as researchers learn more about the topic. Sometimes, the best way to frame a question to guide the study does not become clear until later in the process.  

2. Follow-up questions: Researchers ask these to continue exploring a topic. For example, if we learn in our first study that Unified sports coaches see themselves as mentors to their players, in the next we may ask, “How are players’ experiences influenced by their Unified coaches?” or, “What do players think of their Unified sports coaches?” 

3. Confirmation questions: Researchers ask these to see if the results from a previous study hold up across different circumstances. This helps to confirm or refute the findings of previous studies. For example, we learned Unified coaches saw themselves as mentors in our first study. A replication study may ask similar questions to a new group of coaches to see if they also talk about mentorship.  

In the Unified coach project, our team asks an exploratory question chosen based on data collected for a previous project: “what is like being a high school Unified sports coach?” This is an important lesson: qualitative research is non-linear. That is, there is no list of steps that need to be followed in a particular order. In our case, we first interviewed Unified coaches for a program evaluation of high school Unified sports. We were interested in exploring topics that emerged naturally across conversations with coaches but were not included in the program evaluation.  

Sometimes researchers can start looking for answers in a dataset that already exists. Other times, data on a topic doesn’t exist, and the researchers must decide how to collect the data they need. Creating a new qualitative dataset takes a lot of work, so in the next two entries, we’ll look at what it takes to build a qualitative dataset from one-on-one interviews.  

By Nathan Barrett, Research Assistant at the Center for Social Development and Education