Honours+ Workshop: How to Formulate a Good Research Question

  • Your H+ Challenge provides a unique opportunity to collaborate with fellow students and engage in independent, interdisciplinary research. During your studies, you have already conducted research with varying subjects and scales, but the essence of your work remained the same: trying to answer a particular question.

    Before you design your H+ research, collect and analyze your data, it is imperative to be explicit and clear about what you are trying to find out. Your task therefore, requires a disciplined and thoughtful transformation of your ideas into clearly formulated research questions. Developing a good research question is one of the most challenging stages of your research process.

    In this workshop we will discuss the process of research and the scientific method, and focus on the first stage in research, namely identifying a problem in the real world and forming a research question to address it. We will also reflect on how to bring together your personal skills and how to make your research questions more relevant by employing an interdisciplinary perspective.

    In preparation for this workshop, please read:
    Trochim, W. M. K., Donnelly, J. P. & Arora, K. (2015). Research methods: The essential knowledge base. Cengage learning. Chap. 1, pp. 3-32
    ! If you cannot find a copy of this work in the library, know that we will send you the required chapter also via email 2 days prior to the workshop.

     

    “Interesting and useful in coming up with a good research question.”
    Available sessions:

     

    • Wednesday 03.12.2025, 13:30-16:30 hrs;

    • Tuesday 09.12.2025, 09:30-12:30 hrs.

       

    All “How to Formulate a Good Research Question” workshops are scheduled to take place at EDLAB’s Tapijn Building X. All attendees will receive a reminder email with the exact location two days before the session.

     

    Register here for this workshop.

  • Why?

    To properly tackle your H+ Challenge, it is imperative to be clear about what you are trying to find out. Your task therefore, requires a disciplined and thoughtful transformation of your ideas into clearly formulated research questions. Developing a good research question is one of the most challenging stages of your research process, especially when defining a research question that covers multiple disciplines.
  • Eli Sapir

    Your Workshop Host: Eli Sapir (UM, FASoS)

    Eliyahu (Eli) Sapir is an assistant professor in Social Science Research Methods at Maastricht University. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of European Union politics and social policy, comparative political behavior, and comparative democratization. Sapir is engaged in methodological research, which involves survey methodology broadly defined, political methodology, social statistics, complex data-linking and architecture, text analysis and data visualization. Sapir specializes in the collections, management and analysis of large and complex (multi-dimensional) data structures.