Research Question Diagnostic
Seven questions for a more useful study.
Use these prompts to connect a research request with the decision it needs to inform. They work for an early discussion or as a check on a brief already in progress.
- What will you decide?
- What must you learn?
- What would be enough?
- Decision
What will someone do differently because of the evidence?
- Uncertainty
What must be learned before that decision is responsible?
- What to measure
What exactly needs to be measured: a perception, experience, behaviour, mechanism, outcome, or product property?
- Comparison
Against what baseline, alternative, comparison condition, or expected outcome will the result be interpreted?
- Population, context and time
For whom, where, under what conditions, and over what duration must the conclusion hold?
- Action threshold
What result would trigger proceed, revise, stop, claim, or investigate further?
- Boundary
What conclusion will this design not support, even if the desired result appears?
If these questions are not answerable yet, the next step may be problem framing rather than data collection.