Questions to explore and help you explain your research topic, question and methods

Here’s a list of questions I should have considered from the very outset of my research – but didn’t. In my defence, I was brought on board to a project where a lot of this thinking had already been done and considerable groundwork had been laid. But reading Petre and Rugg (2010) was a bit of an eye-opener and made me realise that somewhere down the line, in a couple of years (or maybe in just months or weeks!) someone is going to ask me why I carried out my first study as I did. And saying, “Because my supervisor told me to” is not going to cut it.

I think the project has been set up really well and my supervisor has put a lot of thought into it, but it would be madness for me to try and start to write it up without being really sure about the foundations of the research. So I drew on Petre and Rugg and came up with a list of questions that we as PhD students may or may not be explicitly asked to address. Personally, I feel safer, more comfortable and more satisfied having given my time and attention to these points.

(For context, I am undertaking a mixed methods psychology study investigating whether a particular intervention has an impact on my population of interest. Some of your questions may be different if you are undertaking purely quantitative or creative work. Even if your work is very positivist, I still think questions of “truth”, “knowledge”, “objectivity” and importance to participants are important.)

1. What problem am I actually trying to solve here?
2. What questions have I not been explicitly asking myself?
3. Flip the research question: do people exposed to my intervention later display more of a certain characteristic? Or are people who already possess that characteristic more likely to engage with my intervention?
4. Devil’s advocate: is my research/intervention the best way to help the population I’m interested in? Could we better support that community by simply giving them our time and research budget so they can decide how to meet their needs?
5. Why does this research matter, and to whom?
6. If I do find an association between my intervention and a certain characteristic in my population, so what?
7. How much have participants been able to shape my research topic and question, or am I imposing those on them?
8. How will I measure the impact of my intervention? Will I used standardised tools or scales, or create my own?
9. How would participants measure the impact of this intervention, and how does that differ from my proposed measures?
10. What is my epistemology? What do I think about the concept of “knowledge” and what constitutes valid findings? If qualitative and quantitative data evoke different “truths”, which one is more important, or how can they be synthesised? How objective can I and my chosen research method be, and is objectivity something I should be striving for anyway?
11. Is my planned methodology the best way of eliciting answers to my research question? Are there other methodologies and data collection methods I could learn about that could enrich my research?
12. What are the risks/disadvantages of my planned methodology?
13. What am I not seeing?

What have I missed from this list? Please suggest additions, criticisms and suggestions in the comments.