Racial disparities and discrimination in education
Draft Research Questions:
Research questions provides a guide for the researcher on what they want to know from the data. Research questions should address a gap in previous research. Research questions also contain relevant concepts and provides insight into overall research design. Qualitative research questions are not an opinion statement or a hypothesis to be tested.
Design one to two research questions that will guide the study of your preliminary research topic/ problem. Remember these are not questions you will be directly asking research participants, but broader questions that will provide direction for your research. Consider the following:
• do not include more than two research questions.
• Research questions should be clear, feasible, and socially relevant.
• Remember to design questions that reflect the use of a qualitative research methodology.
• Avoid questions that could be answered with a “Yes or no”.
• Example question phrases: “How does…”, “What factors…”, “What, if any…”, “To what extent…”
• Questions can be Descriptive: describes concept, topic, problem, phenomena. (eg. How do pre-service Latinx teachers conceptualize social justice in teacher education programs?)
• Questions can be Comparative: seeks to understand if two groups are different on one or more dependent variables (e.g,. How does domestic university students compare with international university students in terms of civic and political engagement?)
• Questions can show Relationships: try to answer the strength of relationships between concepts, variables (e.g. What familial, social, economic, and educational factors positively impact academic achievement for undocumented students in primary education?)
see the next page for the questions that were proposed and the feedback from the professor. This can be changed to reflect the final research paper to come.
Proposed Research Questions:
1. How does the education sector come up with effective policies to ensure everyone gets equalaccess to education?
2. How does race affect education opportunities in African American communities?
“These are very broad questions. Think about ways to narrow down and really focus on a piece of these larger questions. For example:
RQ 1: To what extent does district policy markers center equity and justice within policy development, implementation, and assessment?
RQ2: Not sure what education level/age you want to focus and where the data will be coming from. One example would be, How does African American higher education students perceive race impacting their education trajectories?”
