Research questions · Lesson 1 of 3

Topic, problem, question, objectives, hypothesis

You are not ready to search until you can write objectives, and you cannot write objectives until the question names who and what.

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These five are a ladder from vague to testable, and confusing them is the most common reason a project cannot start.

A topic is an area: social media and wellbeing. It has no answer because it asks nothing.

A problem is what is wrong or unknown within that area: we do not know which patterns of use are associated with harm, so advice to users is generic. A problem statement says why anybody should care.

A question is what you will answer: among university students aged 18 to 24, which patterns of social media use are associated with self-reported sleep disruption? It names who, what, and what relationship you are looking for.

Objectives are what you will do to answer it: measure use patterns; measure sleep disruption; test for association; describe how it varies by pattern. Objectives are activities, and each one should be something you could schedule.

A hypothesis is a specific expected answer you could be wrong about: passive scrolling within an hour of bed is associated with more disruption than active messaging at the same time. Not every project needs one — exploratory and qualitative work often, quite properly, has none.

The ladder also runs downwards as a diagnostic. If you cannot write objectives, the question is too vague. If the question feels unanswerable, the problem has not been stated.

See it happen

You are handed the topic "remote work and productivity" and asked to research it.

The read that arrives on its own

You start searching "remote work productivity" and save everything relevant-looking.

The same situation, with this idea

You climb the ladder first. Problem: organisations are making permanent policy from pandemic-era data that came from an unusual period. Question: among software teams that went fully remote before 2020, how did measured delivery change over the following two years compared with co-located teams? Objectives: identify teams, obtain delivery measures, compare, describe the variation. Now your searches have terms, and you know instantly whether a source is relevant.

After this, you can

turn a topic into something you could actually schedule work against.

The takeaway

You are not ready to search until you can write objectives, and you cannot write objectives until the question names who and what.

Easy to take the wrong way

That you need the full ladder before you begin. A rough version of each rung, revised as you read, beats a perfect topic.

Try this

Write all five rungs for your own project in ten minutes. Note which rung was hardest — that is where the project is currently weakest.