How to Get from a Social Problem to a Research Question and Research Plan

First Few Steps, for Humanistic, Qualitative, Comparative and Quantitative Inquiry

1. Identify an important social problem that you wish to understand and solve.
2. Phrase this social problem as a research question, and explain why it is interesting to you.
3. Offer three plausible answers to the question you pose.
4. Select one case, a few cases, or many similar cases that you wish to study. The cases may be artifacts, individuals, organizations, or institutions.
5. Finally, identify the instances, variables or indicators you would use to assess in each case to support each of the three plausible answers.

In many traditions of inquiry this is a natural stopping point because you now have a research question and structured way to find the best answer. If you want to form and reject specific hypotheses, you must take a few more steps.

Next Few Steps, Usually for Comparative and Quantitative Inquiry

1. Choose three of the variables, and select two pairs from among these variables. For each of these pairs, formulate one possible causal relationship between the two variables. The relationships you specify should be theoretically motivated.
2. Provide abstract and operational definitions for all three variables. What theoretical concepts do these variables represent? How might you actually measure them?
3. Specify two of the possible relationships between two pairs of variables in causal terms. State these in the form of testable hypotheses, with the phrasing “If X, then Y.”
4. Reverse the causal direction of one of your hypotheses. Which of the three causal relationships might still support this new hypothesis, and why?
5. Identify which theoretical paradigms this causal explanation might be consistent with.

For more, see Stinchcombe, A. (1968). Constructing Social Theories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. This work can be cited as Howard, P. (2015). How to Get from a Social Problem to a Research Question and a Research Plan. Retrieved from philhoward.org. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution — Non Commercial — Share Alike 4.0 International License.