Chapter 3

Develop Research Ideas and Questions

5 videos · about 28 minutes · watch as a YouTube playlist →

  1. 1Where good ideas come fromGood ideas are rarely eureka moments. The slow hunch and the adjacent possible explain why a research idea takes longer than a semester allows, and why opening one door tends to reveal several more.4 min
  2. 2Finding a research problem worth studyingWhat separates a research problem from a topic: it has to be solvable by systematic public methods. Bed nets prevent malaria, but we do not know how to get families to use them every night — and that gap is where a study lives.5 min
  3. 3Description as a research goalDescriptive statistics are not descriptive research. What it means to characterize a distribution in a well-defined population, worked through Nepal’s 2011 survey data on modern contraceptive use.4 min
  4. 4Explain and predict: why, what if, what comes nextThe two questions description cannot answer. Qualitative inquiry for why, causal inference for what if, and prediction for what comes next — with a warning about what "predictor" means in a regression table.7 min
  5. 5From question to hypothesisAnswerable does not mean easy. FINER and PICO as checklists for specifying a question, why not all research needs a hypothesis, and why the hypotheses that matter are falsifiable and come from a theory that says why.8 min

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