Characteristics of a Good Question



Characteristics of a Good Question

The first step for any data analysis is pretty simple, you have to think. thinking is really important. In fact, in most data analyses, you should probably do more thinking than doing of the data analysis. Because It will save you a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of frustration if you just think a little bit beforehand about what you want to do before you start digging into the data and digging into the details. One of the most important things about data analysis doesn't actually have to do with the analysis itself, but it is really important to ask a good question.

Of interest to Your Audience

The first characteristic is that it has to be of interest to your audience. And now, the important part of this feature is that you have to be able to define who your audience is going to be. So depending on who you are and where you work and what you're doing, your audience is going to be a different set of people. So, for example, if you're an academic your audience might be collaborators, they might be a scientific community, they might be your funders or the general public for your problem. If you're working at a start up your audience might be your boss or the company leadership or investors or maybe even potential customers. So, knowing who your audience is and knowing what questions are relevant to them is a really important part of asking the right question.

Not Already Answered

The second important part about a good question that hasn't already been answered already, so this may seem a little bit obvious, but with the wealth of data out there and literature and the availability of the Internet, it's quite possible that someone, somewhere out there, has either at least studied your question or maybe even answered it. So doing a simple search and looking to see if your question has already been answered, either inside or outside your organization, can save you a lot of time and money and allow you to ask the real question that people want answered, opposed to one that's already been answered. So it's helpful often to discuss your question with experts in your area, or maybe experts in your organization who could help you to shape your question and to ask one that actually hasn't been answered before.

Plausible

The third feature of a good question is that it's plausible. And the basic idea here, is that you need to be able to have a reasonable explanation for how the world works, if the answer to your question is kinda what you expect it to be. In other words, you should be able to explain the mechanism for how things work. If you can't do this, then it's usually a bad sign that it's not a great question. And the problem with asking a question that's not really plausible is that it may lead you to collect some bad data. In the sense that any analysis that you do with the data might be difficult to interpret and may not really lead to strong evidence about anything in particular. And so that may end up wasting a lot of time, a lot of money for people if you've collected bad data that question is not really plausible. So before you go out and spend the resources to conduct an experiment and do an analysis, try to think about your questions, think about whether you could explain how things would work if you get the answer that you expect. If you can't do that you may need to refine your question a little bit.

Answerable

The fourth feature is that the question has to be answerable. This is another one that might seem a little obvious. But the truth is there are a lot of good questions, really interesting questions, that are just simply not answerable. There may be many reasons why a question can't be answered. There may be ethical reasons where you can't collect the data. You might not have the money. They might require too many resources to try to answer a question. And so, there's a lot of questions that simply have to go unanswered. For example, in health research, there are a lot of questions that we have about how the body works and how does disease occur, but we simply cannot conduct the experiments that we might like to conduct because you might be putting people in danger, or it might be simply unethical to do such experiments. So think about your questions to see whether it's even possible to answer it given the kind of real-life situations that we are in. 

Specific 

the last feature of a good question is very important, and it's that a good question tends to be very specific.

specificity is useful because it often leads to simpler data collection and simpler kind of experiments and data analysis. And so the key word here is sharpness. You'd like to have a question that's very sharp. And that way you'll know whether the data meets your expectations about the question. 
So a simple example might be, you might wanna know whether a good diet leads to better health, okay? So that's a reasonable question. People think that, you eat better, your health will be better in general, but it's not a very specific question, so another version of that question might be, if you eat five servings of fresh fruits and vegetables per day, does that lead to fewer respiratory tract infections or, you know, colds, things like that? So that's a much more specific question, because I'm, instead of saying good diet, I'm saying five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. And instead of saying, better health, I'm saying fewer respiratory tract infections, which is something very specific that we can measure. So, the important thing about having a very specific question is that it often can lead to a well defined intervention, okay? And by the intervention I mean an action that you can take.

given the answer to any data analysis you might do. So, if we collect the data on people who have five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, and we collect data on how many respiratory tract infections that they have. If the data suggests that this question is true, that more fruits and vegetables leads to fewer respiratory tract infections, then we already know how we might intervene in terms of modifying people's diets and improving their health. So a very specific question will tend to lead to a well defined intervention and that will give you, those kinds of results will allow you change behaviors, to change actions to actually make a difference in the world

Whereas a very vague or non-specific question will often leave you in the same place that you started out in and without knowing what kinds of changes to make or what kinds of behaviors to change.

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