About this guide

This guide aims to help you to:

• understand the purpose of a research design
• understand the significance of formulating a research question
• develop the initial focus of your research by exploring different potential starting points for this
• understand different ways of categorising research questions
• identify the characteristics of good research questions and apply these in practice
• develop and evaluate your own research questions
• operationalize your research aim so that you can develop appropriate research tools to answer your research questions by developing question-method connections in your own research
• improve your research data through understanding the nature of validity and reliability and exploration factors that could impact on these