Asking Questions Exercises

Perhaps the most important skill that any researcher can have is the ability to identify interesting questions. Sometimes this is thought to be a natural outgrowth of the curiosity that is so apparent in scientists. The curiosity helps, but the ability to consistently formulate useful questions to guide research is a skill that can be sharpened with practice.

You formulate questions when you talk with a real estate agent or a car salesperson about a purchase you are contemplating, when you ask your children what they were doing when you strongly suspect it was something they should not have been doing, and when you try to figure out why your computer has locked up for the fifth time this evening.

In the exercises below, you will be asked to try to generate as many questions as you can to help uncover critical information. Some of the exercises involve everyday items, whereas others represent more typical scientific research situations. Relax, take a deep breath, and see how many interesting questions you can develop.

Every time you let your dog into your fenced backyard to relieve himself, he runs first to a particular place in the fence, looks carefully, and only then proceeds to do what he was let out to do. What could be going on?
You teach second grade and have two students, Rob and Nathan, who constantly give you trouble. You want to understand what they are doing and why so that you can better handle yourself and handle them.
You are an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service, and it is your job to investigate the financial transactions of someone who reports less than $80,000 a year in income but is living in a $2.2 million home and apparently spending much more than $80,000 per year.
Your entire community is talking about the massive crop circles that have appeared in three different locations in the last two weeks. Are they the work of kids or a manifestation of a visit from aliens?
A developmental psychologist puzzles over one of the more intriguing differences between boys and girls in academic achievement. In high school, girls tend to be more focused and typically outperform boys. By late college, this difference is all but erased. What is happening here?
You have recently moved to a different part of the country. You are used to cold winter weather with lots of sunshine and blue sky, but what you find in your new home is a winter filled with dreary low clouds and temperatures that are 15 degrees warmer than you are used to experiencing.
Your spouse, roommate, or boy/girl friend is clearly angry, apparently at you, and you have no idea why.
You read in the newspaper about someone who froze to death in their car, which had spun into a ditch on the edge of a busy highway. Apparently tens of thousands of people drove by the car over a two-day period, but no one stopped to see if they could help.
You and your family spend Christmas with relatives who have several young children. Each child receives several wonderful toys as gifts, but by late Christmas day they have forsaken their new toys for games that involve playing with the packages and boxes that the toys came in.
After watching two close friends repeatedly make that worst possible choices for mates, you begin to wonder if it is more than just unlucky choices that account for their mate selections.