In this instructional YouTube presentation, dissertation chair Steve Tippins emphasizes that the success of a dissertation hinges on well‑crafted research questions. He defines alignment as the harmony among the problem statement, the study’s purpose, and the research questions, illustrating the concept with an "apples vs. oranges" analogy. Tippins distinguishes qualitative questions (who/what/how) from quantitative ones (measurable differences, significance) and provides concrete examples of each. He outlines the hallmarks of strong questions: they must be specific, answerable with the planned data, free of leading language, and limited to a single focus. He advises testing questions by answering them oneself and soliciting feedback from peers to ensure clarity and feasibility. The talk warns against multi‑part questions that bundle too many variables and stresses the importance of replicability, noting that non‑replicable work can hinder graduation and tenure. Finally, Tippins explains how aligned, well‑designed questions facilitate committee approval, keep the project manageable, and prevent costly revisions later. Throughout, he invites viewers to join a free dissertation help community for additional support.
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Your entire dissertation depends upon your research questions. Are they clear, are they concise, and do they align with everything else in your dissertation? If that's the case, you're going to have a winning dissertation. I'm Steve Tippins, and I've chaired over 300 dissertations, and I'm here today to share with you the steps to coming up with clear and concise research questions. And if you want more information, click the link below to join our free dissertation help community. Most people that I've seen along the process have tried to make their research questions too complicated. If you want to finish your research questions have to be clear, concise, and in alignment. Quite simply, research questions are the backbone to your dissertation. Coming out of your research questions comes your methodology, followed by your data collection, your analysis, and ultimately a completed dissertation. When your questions are too vague or too broad, what happens is they become difficult, if not impossible, to answer. And when your research questions are impossible to answer, you can't finish. So you have to work on your research questions being concise and in align with everything else. I've seen one student finish their entire dissertation quickly by ultimately changing one question in order to make it much more clear from that point that move forward quickly and finished. And that's what you want. So ultimately, what does make a good research question or research questions, and how do you do it? The simple answer is what we call alignment. And by alignment we mean, does everything go in the same direction? Does your problem say one thing, your purpose say another thing, and your research questions still go in another direction? You're not in alignment. But when they all start answering or leading in the same direction, you. You have alignment. So when your problem, your purpose, and your research question all go in the same direction, you have alignment. Quite simply, your problem or your problem statement, as many schools call it, boils down to what don't we know? What hasn't been studied? What's the gap in the literature? Your purpose is ultimately to get to the problem. The purpose of this study is to address the problem. And finally, your research questions are the questions that are going to allow you to get to your problem. So you want them all to go in the same direction. And here's a hint. If you use specific words, you're going to need to use the same words over and over again. You know, one time I was working with a student and I said, look, when your problem is talking about apples and your research question is talking about oranges, you're not going to get there. And you know, that really pushed the student to understand this and pretty quickly apples and oranges became a joke between us. But she finished quickly because she was in alignment and her research questions did exactly what she needed them to do. If you're looking for help in developing strong research questions, join our free dissertation help community to find support and answers. Just use the link below. Like I said at the beginning, we're going to talk about quantitative or qualitative. Qualitative research questions include things like perceptions and approaches and experiences, whereas quantitative research questions include things like significance and differences. So we talk about comparisons in quantitative questions. An example of a qualitative question is how do teachers describe their experience of working with parents and parent teacher conferences versus a quantitative question would be to what degree is there a significant relationship between teachers, interaction with parents at parent parent teacher conferences and student grades? Quantitative questions are measurable. Qualitative questions are who and what and how type questions. But we can't measure and we can't compare things, whereas in quantitative comparison is all part of it. So how would I write a strong research question? One of the keys to a strong research question is is it answerable from the data I'm going to collect? Will I be able to answer that question? Will, which then means am I going to be able to get at the problem I'm looking at in my document? So I want to make my questions specific. I don't want to say what do employees think of leadership. I might say what are employees perceptions of leaders who use transformational leadership styles? That's much more easy to get at and much more defined. Something else we want to do with our research questions is not be leading, don't say things. Well, do you agree that the new policy for employees is bad may not be a strong research question as opposed to a question what are employee perceptions of the new policy on vacation time? That's going to be much easier to answer and you're not going to be getting employees led to the answer you want ahead of time. One way to think about this is okay, I've got research questions. Are they going to work or how are they going to work? Are they going to get me the answers? I need a way that you can use that information to help you is to test out your research questions. Ask yourself how you would answer them. Ask other people not part of your study how they would answer them to see if the meanings that you're putting in the question are actually what the people responding are understanding. Will the answers I get provide the data that's needed to answer the question? If that answer is yes, then you most likely have a strong research question. I also want to say, try not to put too many things in your research question, because then there's a lot of moving parts. Is there a strong relationship between height, weight, and what people had for lunch on their SAT scores? Well, now I've got a lot of moving parts in that question. It might actually be three questions, one for each of those. Height and SAT scores, weight and SAT scores and they had for lunch and SAT scores is going to be much easier to handle and to measure. I also want to be thinking, and this is in designs of all research, is it replicable? Can another researcher use this to do similar research? Because that's one of the things and goals in research is can it be replicated? I once saw a poster that asked why God didn't get tenure, and one of the reasons was his work could not be replicated. You want to make sure your work can be replicated so that you can graduate and that you can ultimately get tenure if needed. If you end up with strong research questions that are in alignment, first your committee is going to approve you to move forward. But even more importantly, when you move forward, you're going to move forward with a project that is doable and doable within a reasonable time period, and that's what you're looking for. What you don't want to do is have to come back and realize, oh, I've collected data, but I didn't get the data I wanted. Maybe I have to go revise my research question. Does that mean I have to collect data again? If you start at the beginning with strong questions, you're going to avoid a lot of problems down the line. And if you're looking for assistance with your research questions, join our free dissertation help community to get help from dissertation chairs who've helped many people get through this process and graduate. So just click the link below and join our community.
