# Transcript

REBECCA HEWETT:

I think it's essential to have the right question set for the project, the right research question. You need to know ahead of time what it is you're trying to find out, because otherwise you're going to be asking and answering the wrong question. And when it comes to making recommendations, coming to making conclusions, they're not going to be relevant and clear, because you're won't have said the right research question in the first place. The whole research process should flow out of the research question, so that's why it's so central.

MARK SAUNDERS:

For me, a good research question is essential for a research project. And I would argue it's probably the most difficult thing for anybody to do. It's easy to come up with a question, but the time you need to spend refining it and getting it clear so you can see how that question is grounded in the literature and will actually help you do more than just describe – because remember, you need to be actually explaining as well as describing – is really crucial.

So there are a few little tips to think about this. And one of the most crucial ones is the way you word that question. Questions that start with the word ‘why’ actually force you to explain. So they're really helpful. Questions that start with ‘what’ force you only to describe, so they're less useful. That's not to say you shouldn't be doing description, but remember, you should be explaining as well. So a question which has the word ‘why’ in becomes really helpful.

However, you're not going to get your question right first go. And your question is actually going to metamorphose over time as you read more of the literature and as you do your research and start to understand your topic better. So what I would suggest is work hard and get a clear question grounded in the literature, which is probably a ‘why’ question or perhaps a ‘to what extent’ question, and sometimes a ‘how’, but definitely not a ‘what’ question. And then as you read more, refine that question.

By that I mean you can make incremental changes, but it would be very worrying if your question changed from, say, something in marketing and ended up in something in operations research, especially given your doing a human resources masters. So you need to keep focus. The idea is working up a question and than narrowing the focus down.

GILLIAN SYMON:

I think the issue of having the right research question in relation to student work is actually a bit more complex than it appears, especially for qualitative research. And I'm speaking as an expert in qualitative research. So for qualitative research, unlike quantitative research, you might have a much broader research question to start with. And in fact, the research question may narrow as you go along.

So it's good to have some sort of broad research question at the start, because it helps you to think about it what literatures you should be looking at, what kinds of questions you want to ask people. But you might find in the process of doing the research that that question becomes more focused, or it might even change quite a lot in relation to what you hear from the participants in the research. You might decide, well, actually, what I thought initially was interesting is not. And I should be looking at this particular issue. So you might actually move a bit, in terms of your research question.

So important to have one, but be prepared to perhaps change it. And this is where it's entirely different from quantitative research. You really wouldn't dare go with that at all. For quantitative research, you decide what your question is. You decide what your hypotheses are, and you test them. And anything else is cheating.

DAVID GUEST:

First of all, it's got to be one which is doable, in terms of posing an opportunity to undertake realistic research, rather than ground theory. Ground theory is all very well in its place, but students have to be realistic about what they can achieve. So first of all, it has to be something which can be defined, contained, but which has a proper question behind it. And I think it's important to differentiate between saying, I'm interested in psychological contract breach, and something which is more like a research question which says, what impact does attribution of causes of psychological contract breach have on the consequences?

You've narrowed it down. You focused it. It becomes researchable at that point. So I think you've got to tie it down into something which is doable and realistic and sufficiently narrow.

The second thing, of course, is access. And you've got to find somewhere where you can test out your question and your research. Now, sometimes it's going to be quite easy. So if you take the example I've just given you, you can probably use a critical instant approach with all sorts of people. All of us have had our psychological contracts breached at various times. All of us have reached conclusions about the consequences of that.

So you could almost do that with friends and relations, so to speak. Much better of course to do it in an organisational context where you can follow through the consequences understand why people felt more or less strongly about the impact of the breach and whether that influenced their attitudes and behaviour. So you need to think about the access question in the broader sense.

And then the third issue, I suppose, is being able to, if it's going to be a good project, relate it a bit to literature and be sufficiently enthusiastic to want to understand how what you're doing relates to what's been done before and also to what is going to be useful in an organisational context. You may have some ideas which you think are great, which actually derive from the literature.

If the organisation thinks they're a complete waste of time, and they have no interest in it at all, somehow you have to learn to compromise a bit. And so you may want to reshape what you're doing a little bit to fit in with what the organisation wants. Maybe if you give them what they want, they'll let you ask the questions you want. It's a matter of being able to negotiate.