Where do Research Questions

Come From?

Associate Professor Tuan Luu

Debate about the findings of a recent poll of people’s opinions inevitably includes a
discussion of ‘research’, normally referring to the way in which the data were collected.
Politicians often justify their policy decisions on the basis of ‘research’.

Newspapers report the findings of research companies’ surveys. Documentary

programmes tell us about ‘research findings’, and advertisers may highlight the ‘results
of research’ to encourage you to buy a particular product or brand.

Walliman (2011) highlights ways in which the term ‘research’ is used wrongly:
• just collecting facts or information with no clear purpose;
• reassembling and reordering facts or information without interpretation;
• as an esoteric activity with no or little relevance to everyday life;
• as a term to get your product or idea noticed and respected.
Research has a number of characteristics:
• Data are collected systematically.
• Data are interpreted systematically.
• There is a clear purpose: to find things out.

Research: something that people undertake in order to find out things in a systematic way, thereby
increasing their knowledge.

Two phrases are important in this definition: ‘systematic way’ and ‘to find out things’. ‘Systematic’
suggests that research is based on logical relationships and not just beliefs (Ghauri and Grønhaug
2010).

‘To find out things’ suggests there are a multiplicity of possible purposes for your research. It is
therefore an activity which means it has to be finished at some time to be of use (Becker 1998).
This will undoubtedly be true for your research project, which will have a specific deadline.
Purposes may include describing, explaining, understanding, criticising and analysing (Ghauri and
Grønhaug 2010). However, it also suggests that you have a clear purpose or set of ‘things’ that you
want to find out, such as the answer to a question or number of questions.
A taxonomy for considering the ‘relevance gap’ in relation to managerial knowledge
Practitioner and management researcher orientations
Sources : Authors’ experience; Easterby-Smith et al. (2008), Hedrick et al. (1993)
The research process
Source: © Mark Saunders, Philip Lewis and Adrian
Thornhill 2011
Where From?

Where do Research Questions Come From?

More frequently used techniques for generating and refining research ideas
 • Start with an interest in some phenomenon
• Read the literature
Where From? • Figure out what is already known
• More importantly, figure out what is unknown or
what controversy there is about the phenomenon
• This can lead to a broad research idea/question
Identifying a
research
question
Examples of research ideas and resulting general focus research questions
Where From?

Could you present your research questions?

Where From?

How to spot gaps in formulating research questions?

 • It is common to refer either positively or mildly critically to
earlier studies in order to “extend . . . this literature”, to
“address this gap in the literature”, to “fill this gap”, to
point at themes that others “have not paid particular
attention to”, or to “call for more empirical research”.
• It is, however, important to note that gap-spotting rarely
involves a simple identification of obvious gaps in a
Gap-spotting given body of literature. Instead, it consists of complex,
constructive, and sometimes creative processes. For
example, one way to create a gap is to synthesize
coherence in which the researcher cites and draws
connections between works and investigative streams
not typically cited together which suggests the existence
of underdeveloped research areas. A gap in existing
literature may also be defined by specific negotiations
between researchers, editors, and reviewers about what
studies actually constitute existing literature and what is
lacking from that domain of literature.
 • An important feature of high-quality qualitative inductive
research is that it discusses “why this qualitative
research is needed. . . . For inductive studies,
articulating one’s motivation not only involves reviewing
the literature to illustrate some ‘gaps’ in prior research,
but also explaining why it is important to fill this gap.
Gap-spotting
•  It plays a crucial role in developing existing
management literature through systematic and
incremental additions, as well as through identifying
and addressing more significant gaps in it.
 • Such “gap-spotting” means that the assumptions
underlying existing literature for the most part
remain unchallenged in the formulation of research
questions. In other words, gap-spotting tends to
underproblematize existing literature and, thus,
reinforces rather than challenges already influential
Challenging theories.
Assumptions: The • Regardless of variations in size and complexity, and
Focal Point in regardless of the fact that researchers often
Generating Research creatively construct gaps in existing literature and
Questions Through criticize it for being deficient in some way (e.g., for
being incomplete, inadequate, inconclusive, or
Problematization underdeveloped), they rarely challenge the
literature’s underlying assumptions in any significant
way.

• Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through

problematization. Academy of management review, 36(2), 247-271.
• Kock, F., Assaf, A. G., & Tsionas, M. G. (2020). Developing courageous research
ideas. Journal of Travel Research, 59(6), 1140-1146.
 • The findings revealed that later in the crisis, the mental
models of leaders were similar to the initial shared mental
model held by followers. In other words, the findings also
challenge the assumption that communication and influence
Some recent between leaders and followers is strictly one-way (Marks et
al., 2000) and top-down (Bourgeois, 1980; Dess, 1987).
examples Consequently, our findings point to a dynamic exchange
occurring between the team mental models of both leaders
and followers.

• Source: Carrington, D. J., Combe, I. A., & Mumford, M. D. (2019). Cognitive shifts within leader
and follower teams: Where consensus develops in mental models during an organizational
crisis. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(3), 335-350.
 • Our findings challenge the assumption that negative emotions
are inherently dysfunctional for the enactment of interpersonal
justice and instead highlight the facilitative role of anxiety in
Some recent this context.

examples • Source: Hillebrandt, A., Saldanha, M. F., Brady, D. L., & Barclay, L. J. (2022). Delivering bad
news fairly: The influence of core self-evaluations and anxiety for the enactment of
interpersonal justice. human relations, 75(7), 1238-1269.
 • Ultimately, our model challenges the assumption that individual
knowledge-related efforts automatically accrue to the MNE level.
We argue that effective knowledge sourcing by the MNE is the
result of successful unit-level processes in managing individual
heterogeneity and ensuring consistency with global integration
and local adaptation pressures.
• Source: Santangelo, G. D., & Phene, A. (2022). Knowledge sourcing by the multinational enterprise: An
individual creativity-based model. Journal of International Business Studies, 53(3), 434-448.

Some recent
examples
 • This finding challenges the assumption that teams with
mindful members can definitely develop team mindfulness
and also reveals when team average individual mindfulness
Some recent exerts beneficial influences on team mindfulness. Our
research further supports the necessity of considering both
the average level and diversity of individual mindfulness to
examples fully understand the relationship between team individual
mindfulness composition and team mindfulness.

• Source: Liu, X., Zheng, X., Yu, Y., Owens, B. P., & Ni, D. (2022). How and when team average
individual mindfulness facilitates team mindfulness: The roles of team relational stress and
team individual mindfulness diversity. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 43(3), 430-447.
Then What?
 • Write the research question(s) in unambiguous
terms
• This step is not as easy as it sounds
Then What? • Getting the questions very focused is the key to
good research
• Once you have the research question(s) you
can start thinking about ways to answer them
• This is the research methodology
 Is this a good research questions?
Then What?
• How does social media affect people’s behavior?
Bad research question: How does social media affect people’s
behavior?
Good research question: What effect does the daily use of YouTube
have on the attention span of children aged under 16?
Then What?
The first research question is considered bad because of the vagueness
of “social media” as a concept and the question’s lack of specificity. A
good research question should be specific and focused, and its answer
should be discovered through data collection and analysis.
Which of the following are helpful when developing a research topic?

A. Review
Then your class readings
What?
B. Research sub-topics that you are interested in
C. Do background reading on the internet
D. All of the above
Which of the following are helpful when developing a research topic?

Then What?
A. Review your class readings
B. Research sub-topics that you are interested in
C. Do background reading on the internet
D. All of the above
Is the following a research question or a thesis statement:
How effective are Coca-Cola's marketing strategies in marketing to the
over 60 demographic?
Then What?
A. Thesis statement
B. Research Question
Is the following a research question or a thesis statement:
How effective are Coca-Cola's marketing strategies in marketing to the
over 60 demographic?
Then What?
A. Thesis statement
B. Research Question
Which of the following would make a good research question?

A. A who/where
Then What? question
B. An open-ended question
C. A yes/no question
D. A question not related to your topic
Which of the following would make a good research question?

Then
A. What?
A who/where question
B. An open-ended question
C. A yes/no question
D. A question not related to your topic
Criteria to devise useful research objectives
Common
mistakes
 1. Non-originality
2. Non-feasibility:
Common a) Time constraint (don’t have enough time)
mistakes when b) Resources (lack of data, codes)
identifying new c) Knowledge (Do I know how to apply model X?
Can I learn in the limited amount of time?)
research 3. Too broadly defined research question
questions 4. Not well justified
5. Lacking [management/economics] content
Grand, middle-range and substantive theories
Questions?