Hello everyone,

Can anyone suggest books that I can read on defining a PhD research question?

Your question is very general. A research question in maths, for example, is a completely different proposition to one in art and design. What is your area?

General PhD guides usually contain principles of structuring generic questions.

jojo, i've found one lecture from a methodology course very useful. i think i still have the extensive powerpoint slides (from which just a few are very relevant, but the rest help to contextualise them). if you'd let me know some sort of anonymous e-mail address, i would send them to you.

have your supervisors been criticising your framing of the research questions?

edit: i DO still have the slides, i don't just think so

another edit: just read on your diary thread. so sorry to hear that. but mostly, i can hardly believe it! i mean, seriously, helping you to get from a vague research interest to a well defined, relevant, and doable research question is one of the key jobs for any supervisor! or at least to guide you in that they judge, critizise, feedback on the questions you come up with before you embark on a long study of them. at least in my book it is. if they are getting at you about your QUESTION at this stage, they are seriously just admitting that they haven't been doing their job! aaargh that makes me so angry, just hearing it! i hope you are not letting it get you down - it is them that should be in trouble, not you!

I agree that this is very late in the day to criticise the scope of the central question! Sorry to hear you are having such a tough time. This really should have been sorted out in your first year.

Excellent book on this is by Creswell, hang on let me hunt up the citation! Its J Creswell, Qualatative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches, Sage Publications, 2nd edition, 2007. He tells you EXACTLY how to go about setting up this thing with defining the research question--he talks about arriving at a purpose statement for the research and then from that, your research question. My Methods chapter starts with a Research Purpose Statement and a Research Question, that I worked on after reading his book.

Even if you are doing quants, I think his insight on setting this up is so helpful. I HAD a research question and its not varied at all generally, but his book helped provide the focus on how to state the question and areas of inquiry--and why its so helpful and even necessary to do this.

I would recommend this book to ANYONE who is working on a PhD. Even if you have a well defined research question already, his book talks about how to frame a question in a way that is useful to guide the research--how to have a concise question, what it does, how to think about the research---he really puts all of these issues in a nice frame and shows how it really helps clarify research.

I don't have the book in front of me, so am vague on the particulars, but I think it talked about being able to have a short-ish statement for both the purpose of the research and the research question itself. That forces you to crystalise the ideas in your own head...and its NOT easy to make those short statements, but once you have them, its such a nice place to go back and sort of center yourself as you go, remembering the focus, and knowing when you have headed off in the weeds.

thanks everyone for your support during this difficult time.

Olivia - thanks. i've borrowed the book. i hope it clarifies how i can improve my thesis.