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How to Formulate a Research Problem By Wanda Thibodeaux, eHow Contributor

Printed materials are some of the best resources for formulating research problems.

Research is crucial to discovering new information. Perhaps the most important part of research is formulating a research problem. Formulating a research problem shows a researcher where previous researchers have been deficient and identifies avenues of study that have not yet been pursued. Researchers must be careful to formulate their research problems properly in order to make sure that their research intent is not ambiguous, and to make sure that the information obtained through the research is of significance.

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Instructions
    • 1

      Identify a general area you would like to study. At this point, you're just narrowing down what research problems are available to examine.

    • 2

      Narrow your general areas of interest into smaller subcategories. For example, if you want to study African tribes, you might look only at tribes in Nigeria. Pick one of these subcategories on which to focus.

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    • 3

      Look at websites, journals and other print publications in order to learn about your subcategory of interest. Identify assumptions experts in the field have made, as well as any key terms or theories that appear to be present.

    • 4

      Identify gaps in your research knowledge base. For example, if you're studying Nigerian tribes, perhaps previous researchers looked at tribal behavior but not tribal economies. Develop a set of questions based on these knowledge gaps.

    • 5

      Look at the objectives for each of your research questions in order to determine whether you feasibly may find an answer to them. Ask yourself questions such as what value the research answer will have, whether there are any ethical issues involved in your research and how much it will cost to find out what you want to know. Pick the research question that seems most likely to get an accurate answer.

    • 6

      Restate your research question as a statement that identifies the problem in terms of who, what, why, when or where. For example, you could write, "This research study examined what factors influenced the economic status of members of Nigerian tribe A."

    • 7

      Write out several sentences that very briefly explain the knowledge gap you identified and then place your research statement at the end. Together, these sentences form your entire research problem. If written correctly, your research problem easily may be extracted from your paper as part of your abstract

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