Research Question Formulation

The goal of communication research is to ask important questions that allow scholars to get useful answers to advance the knowledge of some aspect of communication. These questions are known as research questions. Research questions explore tentative relationships between variables and represent the basic research interests. One purpose of research questions is to narrow the topic of study. Another purpose of research questions is to help guide the research project. Ultimately, research questions are a statement of what the researcher wants to know about or understand upon the completion of the study. This entry discusses the use of research questions in quantitative [Page 1454]and qualitative research. It also discusses how to formulate effective quantitative and qualitative research questions.