Assessment Toolbox: Getting Started

What is it that you want to know will formulate your research question.

John "Creswell (as cited in Race 2010, p. 1262) has suggested that before searching the literature, a researcher should identify a topic, using such strategies as drafting a brief title or stating a central research question."

"The problem to be invesitgated in a study stated in the form of a question. . . A research question is usally more exploratory than a research hypothesis or a null hypothesis (W. Paul Vogt 277)."

References

Race, R. (2010). Research Question. In Neil J. Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Research Design. (pp. 1262-1263). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412961288.n383

Research Question. (2005). In W. Paul Vogt (Ed.), Dictionary of Statistics & Methodology. (3^rd ed., pp. 277-278). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412983907.n1680

Quantitative is research data you can Quantify. Qualitative research is describing the quality of something complex that is more difficult to measure with numbers. A mixed methods approach combines these two.