Research Roadmap

Research question

In short, a well-formulated research question helps to ensure that the research project is of benefit to patients and clinicians and helps your research project to yield relevant and precise answers within the resources available.

Research projects should be designed to answer a specific question, usually by testing a well-formed hypothesis, determining whether or not there exists a potential relationship between variables or phenomena based on existing knowledge, theory or observation. 

Research questions are the link between the problem at which the project is aimed, the study design, the results, and the conclusions. Because research questions are the backbone of research projects, considerable care needs to be taken in choosing and developing research questions.

Broadly speaking, clinical research questions can be divided into questions related to the primary clinical domains therapy, prevention, diagnosis, prognosis and etiology:

• Therapy/prevention (intervention): Questions of a therapeutic/preventive intervention to achieve/prevent some outcome (e.g. drugs, surgical intervention, change in diet, counseling, etc.);
• Diagnosis: Questions of identification of a disorder in a patient presenting with specific symptoms;
• Prognosis: Questions of likelihood of disease occurring or progression of disease;
• Etiology: Questions of impact from an exposure; What causes the illness/problem?

To develop and formulate a specific clinical research question the PICOT model  is a wellknown and helpful tool for structuring the question. PICOT is an acronym for the elements of the clinical research question: patient/population/problem of interest (P), intervention or exposure of interest (therapeutic/preventive intervention, diagnostic test, prognostic factor, etiologic factor) (I), comparison/control of interest (C), outcome(s) of interest (O), and the appropriate follow-up time to assess the outcome (T). See this page how to formulate a PICOT depending on the type (domain) of your research question (Table “Template and definitions for PICOT questions”)

Once the clinical research question is developed using the PICOT framework, the FINER criteria can be used to assess the quality of the research question and determine if the research is feasible. The FINER criteria state that a research question must be Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical and Relevant.

Research hypothesis

The research hypothesis is developed from of the research question. It is a statement about the expected relationschip between the main elements of the study (as defined in the PICOT), that is clear, specific and testable for statistical and ultimately clinical significance.
Designing an adequate research hypothesis is supported by a good research question explored through background research, and will influence the type of research design for the study.

If you have any questions about formulating an effective research question and hypothesis, you can request support from the department Epidemiology and Data Science (EDS) on their Service Portal EDS-Consult.