After developing a general understanding of your topic and the associated major concepts, it's time to begin drafting a research question. A research question is a statement that identifies a narrow area of inquiry related to a specific problem and/or gap in knowledge. It provides focus to your research, limiting the amount and kind of information needed to only that which answers your question, and offers a clear target for completion. You will have a better idea of when you have a sufficient amount of information if you have a specific question you are working to answer.
A good research question typically has two elements or two ideas whose relationship you would like to investigate. Essentially we want to learn, draw conclusions, and make recommendations about the relationship between these two ideas.
A note of caution: Including more than two elements in your research question can significantly reduce the sources available that address your question. Only add additional elements if you need to further narrow your results. For example, if we added a specific geographic location to the question above there likely would be far fewer resources available that address the question.
To start drafting a research question, consider what you have learned while doing background research, narrow your topic to one aspect that you would like to know more about, and identify controversies or unresolved questions related to your narrowed topic.
Finally, an effective research question will not be answerable with a simple "yes" or "no." A research question will require you to find, analyze, and draw conclusions from sources in order to arrive at a tentative evidence based answer. Likewise, a research question should address a debatable idea that is answerable through investigation of the available evidence.
