Developing Research Questions That Encourage Critical Thinking

Crafting Qualitative Research Questions: The Key to Your Study 🎯 Your qualitative research question is the compass 🧭 of your study. It guides every aspect—from data collection to analysis—and ensures your findings address the core phenomenon you're exploring. Here’s a breakdown of how to design effective qualitative research questions: 1. Purpose-Driven Questions ✨ Start with the intent of your study. Qualitative research seeks to explore, understand, or describe experiences, processes, or phenomena. Use open-ended phrases like: "What are the experiences of..." 🗣️ "How do individuals perceive..." 👀 "Why do people engage in..." ❓ 2. Key Characteristics 🗝️ Open-Ended: Avoid yes/no formats to enable depth. Exploratory: Focus on understanding rather than measuring. Contextual: Embed questions within the specific cultural, social, or situational settings of your study. 3. Common Frameworks 🏗️ Qualitative research questions often align with methodological traditions: Phenomenology: "What is the lived experience of [X]?" 🌅 Grounded Theory: "How do [participants] navigate [phenomenon]?" 🛤️ Ethnography: "What are the cultural practices of [group] in [context]?" 🏘️ Narrative: "How do individuals construct stories about [experience]?" 📖 4. Examples 💡 "What are the factors influencing community trust in healthcare systems? 🏥" "How do teachers adapt to online learning in resource-limited settings? 💻" "What strategies do caregivers use to manage stress? 💆♀️" 5. Iterative Refinement 🔄 As you immerse yourself in the research, refine your questions to reflect new insights and ensure they remain aligned with your study's purpose. 🛠️ Whether you're embarking on your first study or honing expertise, mastering research questions ensures clarity and focus. What qualitative inquiry will you design next? 🤔

On problematization as a research method (or a guide for early career scholars). Problematization is one of the most challenging things a scholar must learn to do. Why? Because it requires us, as scholars, to question everything that we know. Doing it well, requires us to constructively identify and articulate issues or inconsistencies in established knowledge, frameworks, or practices to open new avenues for inquiry and understanding. Being constructive is important because if we become too critical, problematization becomes a nihilistic exercise - with scant useful outcomes. But how to do it? In a constructive way? Brahim Hinda just published a framework that walks you through five approaches to problematization, offers guidance on how to pursue them, and grounds them in the appropriate literatures. What I like about the paper, is Hinda does not suggest that one or another approach to problematization is superior, rather, it advocates for using several approaches in concert - to really sort out the issues. Give it a look! Citation: Hiba, B. (2025). If you don't problematize it, you won't see it, and you won't understand it. New Ideas in Psychology, 77, 101141. Link: https://lnkd.in/eWtXs3YS Abstract: This paper critically redefines problematization as both a research method and a transformative approach to critical thinking, positioning it as a pivotal modus operandi that transcends the limitations of conventional research practices. Diverging from traditional established research methods focused on gap-spotting and incremental contributions, this paper underscores problematization's unique capacity to interrogate and disrupt the foundational assumptions underpinning existing knowledge structures. By doing so, it drives researchers to reimagine and expand the horizons of scholarly inquiry. Grounded in the intellectual contributions of Nietzsche, Foucault, Marx, Heidegger, Deleuze, and Lacan, this paper addresses the theoretical limitations of the discourse about problematization, often clouded by complex philosophical jargon, while dismantling misconceptions about its nature and application. Beyond theoretical exploration, this paper introduces a practical framework that integrates innovative metaphors, discursive clarity, and actionable strategies. This framework is tailored to empower doctoral students and early-career researchers, equipping them with a taxonomy of epistemological and critical questions for effectively problematizing research problems. The research questions guiding this paper investigate how problematization can be reinterpreted and operationalized to challenge the ideological and power dynamics within dominant research paradigms. Furthermore, this paper explores how a multi-modal approach—combining rhizomatic, genealogical, visual, metaphorical, and ecological thinking—can deepen the practice of problematization.

👩🏫 Coaching doctoral students through research question (RQ) revision is one of the most rewarding and revealing jobs I have. Recently, I was working with a grad student whose interview-based study explored how high school English teachers experience writing instruction. Her RQs were thoughtful, but one of them risked nudging participants toward a particular kind of answer, a “leading question,” in qualitative terms. We discussed ways to reframe it: Instead of “What training do teachers need...,” try “How do teachers talk about the training that supports...” In that moment, we weren't changing the content of the question but rather exploring different ways to shape its meaning, tone, and implications by expanding her expressive toolkit. 🤖 She asked whether using ChatGPT or Claude might help with that kind of rewording. My response: Absolutely BUT only with a critical mindset. Language models can offer an amazing range of linguistic options. They’re great for brainstorming alternate phrasings or surfacing patterns we might not have seen. Here's what I told her: 🪞 Language models can be valuable tools for expanding our expressive range once we have clarity of communicative intent and conceptual stance. 🪞 Because language is never neutral, these tools can subtly redirect our ideas under the guise of 'wordsmithing.' We have to treat their outputs as ideologically loaded options to be critically sifted. And this is true whether we’re writing a research question, a mission statement, or a LinkedIn post. Words aren’t just words. They’re meaning-making tools. 🧭 Let the thinking lead the language, not the other way around. 🧭