Hi everyone! I just got off reading through 15+ pages of the chapter- ‘From Topics to Questions’ from the book ‘The Craft of Research’ today and I could not wait to share my first thoughts about it! The authors (Booth, Colomb, and Williams) clearly outlined the crucial need for defining a meaningful topic for conducting educational research, backed by analysis of the relevance of it to the larger audience (as demonstrated by asking the ‘Whys’ and ‘So Whats’ to arrive at an optimally defined problem statement). I believe this clearly is a key distinguishing characteristic of a well-written research paper from what would otherwise be a collection of random facts and data.
In fact, I came across something similar while reading about the ‘Minto Pyramid Principle’ and the now popular acronym MECE (Mutually Exclusive Comprehensively Exhaustive), a term coined by Barbara Minto, the first female MBA professional hire at the renowned management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co. I believe the techniques of Pyramid Principle really takes the research problem definition to a next level by articulating a structured approach to problem solving, beginning with defining a problem statement, to having a hypothesis for problem resolution, to writing issue trees, and then getting to fact or data gathering. In fact, Minto suggests that there is a hierarchy and sequence in which the questions or the issues need to be structured so as to arrive at the right answer. Here is a link to an interesting article on how Minto arrived at the Pyramid Principle and MECE acronym:
There is also an interesting video on this topic that describes how to formulate a research problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KywZXYXiQ8s
I believe that these research problem formulation techniques are crucial not only for educational research, but also in business settings, and indeed in our day-to-day life as well. Formulating a well-written problem can efficiently and effectively lead us to solve complex problems, while optimizing the meagre resources that are generally there at our disposal.