Assignment Week 3: Research Question and Hypothesis Exercise  

1. Start your assignment with an introductory paragraph about your research topic and why it is of interest and a research “puzzle.” You want to guide your reader from your research area to your research topic, then on to your general research question, and specific research question.  While there are many ways to frame a research question, at the graduate level, your research questions should be 1) open-ended and start with “How,” “Why,” “What,” or “To what extent;” 2) should incorporate the variables you seek to assess and their relationship; and 3) should indicate how you intend to test the nature of that relationship.  You want to make sure that your question has an appropriate amount of complexity so that it requires a significant amount of research and analysis. A simple Google search should not be able to answer your research question; and 4) a simple yes or not should not be able to answer your question.

2. Next, provide a purpose statement that conveys your intentions about what you hope to produce. See the reference in your Lessons and review that it will usually be prefaced by some phrase like the following: "This paper examines . . .," "The aim of this paper is to . . .," or "The purpose of this essay is to . . .". Remember that a purpose statement makes a promise to the reader about the development of the argument but does not preview the particular conclusions that the writer has drawn. Your purpose statement should demonstrate what you are hoping to find out, and also explain what you want your readers to understand (motivation or argument of the research).

3. Pull out the explanatory variables that help you answer your question.  These can be causal (dependent (DV) and independent variable (IV)) or simply helpful to answer the question.   You need to focus in on one or two specific variables (and discuss how they are defined), otherwise your research will quickly spin out of control as you will not have the capacity to effectively address the relationship between all the variables.  The PRS Group offers a good list of variables they use in their research.  This list is just an example of variable to show you what a variable might look like and how it might be defined.

4.  From here develop a hypothesis that reflects your educated guess regarding the answer to the research question. This will typically relate to the variables that you chose.  

Hypothesis:  A statement for how a change or condition in one or more independent variables cause(s) a change or condition in a dependent variable

5.  Finally, explain why these are the important variables to look at within this research project.  Why focus on these variables and not other variables?