KEYWORDS IN TVET RESEARCH 1B:

RESEARCH QUESTION

Put together by: Prof. Dr. Markus M. Dr. Böhner

MINISTRY FOR SKILLS DEVELOPMENT AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING
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Or put differently and fine-tuned for TVET:

Research Questions
A research question is an answerable inquiry into a specific concern or issue. It is the initial
step in a research project. The 'initial step' means after you have an idea of what you want to
study, the research question is the first active step in the research project.
A metaphor for a research project is a house. Your data collection forms the walls, and your
hypothesis that guides your data collection is the foundation. So what is the research question? It
is the ground beneath the foundation. It is what everything in a research project is built on.
Without a question, you can't have a hypothesis. Without the hypothesis, you won't know how to
study what you're interested in.
A research question forms the base of where you are going, so we have to write a good research
question. If your foundation is built on something shifty, like a house built on sand, then

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everything following that will be about correcting that initial issue instead of on making an
awesome home/research project.

Writing a Research Question

Writing a good research question means you have something you want to study. Let's say you're
interested in the effects of television. We will examine the steps, and then look at how you could
write a research question.

 Specify your specific concern or issue

 Decide what you want to know about the specific concern or issue
 Turn what you want to know and the specific concern into a question
 Ensure that the question is answerable
 Check to make sure the question is not too broad or too narrow

This is the basic process in writing a research question. Writing a good question will result in a
better research project.

Example
You, as the researcher, are interested in studying the effects of teaching in TVET. Unfortunately,
this kind of topic is so broad that we can't really do anything with it. This is one of the first
mistakes made by new researchers: picking broad, ill-defined topics. What we want to do is
make our topic more specific, such as what effects teaching has on soft skills. Teaching and soft
skills is a more specific topic than just teaching in TVET (which would encompass teaching and
technical competence, teaching and number of lessons/practicals, teaching and student activity,
and many, many more). Right now we have: 'What is up with teaching and soft skills?'
We are going to study teaching and soft skills, but what specifically about the two? The idea that
people who get taught in TVET become more should also acquire some soft skills has been
studied in excess, so let's put a twist on it. Let's inquire about the teachers with an outspoken
intent on promoting soft skills in their classes, to make it more interesting. So our question turns
into:
“Do all teachers that openly want to further soft skills create higher impact, and do all teachers
that don not intentionally further soft skills create lower impact?’
Is it possible to answer that question? Not yet!
Specifically, our question deals with all teachers and all soft skills. We can’t possibly survey all
teachers in TVET in Sri Lanka and all soft skills. So the next step is to polish of what we have so
far, making sure that we can answer it. Our question is now: “Do teachers that openly want to
further specific soft skills create higher impact, and do teachers that do not intentionally further
soft skills create lower impact?” We removed the ALL and the MORE, making it about a sample
group of teachers instead of all teachers and their soft skills teaching habits.
So the research question in somewhat more pinned down. Is it accessible to research yet?

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NO! A sample group is possible now as well as a certain soft skill, indicated by the word
SPECIFIC. But we still need to pin it down.
So depending on your time constraints, institutional access and your funding, you will have to
decide on a certain target group from which you take your sample. Moreover, the specific soft
skill needs to be defined so that you can research indicators.
Example: You may be working in the research division of DTET, and your special interest is the
Colleges of Technology. You also decide, after consulting the literature what important soft
skills define success in the workplace these days, to restrict your research to adaptive skills, as a
subgroup of soft skills.
Consequently, your refined research question will be now:
“Do teachers in Colleges of Technology that openly want to further adaptive skills create higher
impact?”
“Higher impact” is still somewhat lax as a formulation, but you could do with it. Better might be
“increased competence output”.
In the realm of operationalization, you will still need to define the terms, put down and reasons
for your sample and turns defined adaptive skills in measureable items in questionnaires, tests,
interviews etc.