Developing a research question can be a challenge if you do not already have a research or paper topic.

If you have a research or paper topic already, you can proceed with using your topic to develop a research question or paper thesis statement.

Click here to proceed to information on gathering background information. 

If you do not have a research or paper topic already, the following tips will help you develop one. Keep in mind that as you research, your topic might change, and your instructor may also have good ideas or feedback about it for you.

Coming up with a research or paper topic requires thought about what interests one about course topics, topics of other papers or research studies. It could also be on related topics that one might wonder about.

Say, for example, one might be interested in religiosity or spirituality and attachment, pornography, or marital relationships and coping with stress. These topics could be from what just one is interested in from courses, other papers or research studies, or other things. 

Previous research should be conducted to help you learn about topics you are interested in, as well as to help you learn vocabulary about a subject. 

While it is important to come up with these broad topics, one needs to consider how each of these things will be focused on or measured (i.e., operationalized). While the paper may be on attachment or pornography, there are many aspects of these two concepts that could be studied. For example, one might look at either maternal or paternal attachment, attachment in collectivistic vs. individualistic cultures, one’s attachment to God, differences in attachment style, attachment when young vs. as an adult, etc. Religiosity and spirituality could vary with religious orientation, one’s concept of God, fundamentalism, religious experience, religious coping, spiritual well-being, etc.

Therefore, it is important to think about how you want to operationally define the topic(s) you want to study. Unless you want to write on all aspects of a topic, you need to decide what you want to focus on, as well as how to measure or operationalize it if proposing or conducting a research study. If you want to look at pornography, for example, you will have to decide what about pornography you would like to focus on. Whether one studies the research on pornographic content or pornography viewing habits and its impact are a couple of examples.

One needs to consider the scope and purpose of the project or paper in coming up with topics as well. Is the paper, for instance, a literature review on a topic? Is it a response paper with just background information needed? Is it a thesis, capstone, or dissertation–something that might be formally published later? How much time do you have to work on it? How long should the paper or project be? All these questions should be considered while deciding on a topic.

From your broad topic to identifying which aspect(s) of the topic you want to focus on, it is important to also consider how multiple aspects relate to each other. Unless you would like to look at a single topic in general, you need to decide how they might impact each other. If you are looking at a single topic, you need to decide what aspects of that topic to focus on. It is important to keep in mind what variable(s) you want to focus on and their relationship(s) to each other. This will be the basis for how your sentence is structured. It will also help you identify the areas within the body of research you focus on in the literature review, and also can inform the type of research methodology and/or analysis used.

Click here to look at some examples.