How Do I Create a Research Question?

Defining the value and uniqueness of your research question, and how you ask it, will influence the results you receive. This can be a trial-and-error process, and you’ll likely refine it a few times before you land on the best choice.

Creating a research question is like the Goldilocks and the Three Bears tale: there, Goldilocks looks to find something “just right” in her search for the perfect chair, porridge, and bed.

Like Goldilocks, you don’t want to have extremes in your question, like it being too narrow or too broad. Rather, you want to try the right amount of detail so you can receive the most relevant results. (Or like in the story: it’s just right!)

Refining Your Initial Research Question

With this guidance in mind, let’s try reworking the research question above.

The primary topic we want to explore here is health misinformation. Through this, there are some factors you might want to include, such as social media, the type of health-related phenomena affected, and the audience you are targeting.

If we define these concepts too much, or attempt to pre-determine our answer, we might overwork the question and get irrelevant or unattainable search results. We want our own voice to sound unique in the field!

Let’s break down these interests below!

On Social Media

Social media is a broad term that can mean a lot of different things, but we can narrow it down!

We may want to focus on a type by using a term like “video-sharing social media” instead. By doing that, we can widen our scope just enough to find research with relevant platforms or terms (e.g. TikTok OR Instagram OR YouTube), but not too specific on one application which could lead to only a few results.

On Health and Wellness

Again, this is a pretty broad topic that can hold many different ideas under its umbrella. Perhaps we can look at one concept in the health and wellness sphere, such as “exercise”.

On our Audience

Defining a specific group may be difficult, especially if there are missing voices or perspectives that leave gaps in the literature. Defining an audience or population can help narrow a broad scope, but it might be hard to find data for specific ranges, especially for newer platforms.

For this example, we will try to keep it to general users of the type of social media we’re looking for now. If you want to narrow it down to a timeframe, you can also look at specific events or date ranges.

On Misinformation

Since we know we are looking at health-related topics, we can use an official term like “health misinformation”. This term also provides some flexibility in looking at alternative terms/concepts that may be helpful, such as “health disinformation” or “health malinformation”, since it although it they all have defined and separate meanings, some research or perspectives in this field may use these terms interchangeably.