A research question is something that keeps you interested in your research. It is a question that is relevant to you, but also interesting to other researchers in your area and to people who have a problem at work or in their daily life and want to solve it.
There could be many questions: how to cure cancer, how to reduce risk of suicide in youngsters, what impacts is social media having in the marketing of companies, how do ethnic minorities coexist in socially deprived areas; why are we having more floods in cities; or when is the best time for a company to enter into a new market. Questions can be answered from the perspective of different areas of knowledge.
I normally ask my students who do their dissertations or theses to start with a few questions. These questions should be interesting for them first of all. We rephrase some of the questions and then I ask them to go away and READ. I suggest they read literature from at least two areas of knowledge. This will ensure that students can see differences in perspective.
Reading has the powerful effect to give you answers to your questions, but also to open up new questions. If you read the literature of a subject you can identify what questions have driven researchers to pursue their research. You can also identify other questions that they have not answered or that they are formulated to be pursued in the future. Reading is a powerful source of questions.
The more reading we do the more questions we have, but also the more information we can exchange in conversation. So we can meet again, look at questions and go again and read.
Of course you can (and should) review and modify your questions as you progress. Some questions need to be divided into sub questions. Others might become less relevant or interesting for you. And others are answered by other researchers when they publish their work.
What is important for you as a researcher is to keep a research question alive. By doing this you will also keep your motivation alive.
And also make sure that you are able to provide some reasonable answers to the questions that you set within the time frame of your research project (dissertation, thesis). Maybe you have a big research question that will take a lifetime to answer. So please do not forget that question. But for now, we should focus on how to start answering it in the time that is set for your project.
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