Your professor says your research question is too broad: what it means and how to narrow it

When a professor writes "too broad" beside your research question, the comment means that no single study with your time and resources could answer it. The question may be a good one. It is simply bigger than the project.

The fix is not to abandon the topic. It is to cut the question down until one person can answer it with data they can actually collect.

What a broad question looks like

Broad questions share a few features. You can find most of them in your own question by reading it slowly.

• A large population. "Employees," "students," and "women" are populations of millions.
• No place or time. The question applies everywhere and always.
• Vague outcome words. "Impact," "effectiveness," "role," and "influence" can each mean a dozen things.
• Too many variables. The question tries to cover leadership, culture, pay, and training at once.

Here is a typical example: "How does leadership affect employee performance?" A committee cannot tell who the employees are, which leadership style is meant, or how performance would be measured. A student who tries to answer it will read for months and still not know where to stop.

How to narrow it

Work through the question and fix one feature at a time.

1. Name the population. Who, exactly? A profession, an age group, a type of organization.
2. Set the place and the time. One city, one county, one school district, one academic year.
3. Choose one or two variables. Pick the variables your theory and your literature point to, and leave the rest for another study.
4. Say how each variable will be measured. A named instrument or a defined data source makes the question concrete.
5. Match the verb to the method. "Is related to" and "differs between" suit surveys. "Describe" and "experience" suit interviews.

Applied to the example above, the question becomes: "Is transformational leadership, measured with the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, related to job satisfaction among nurses in public hospitals in Kisumu County?" The population, place, variables, and instrument are all named, and a reader can see how the study would run.

A qualitative example works the same way. "How do students experience online learning?" becomes "How do first-year nursing students at Kenyatta University describe their experience of online anatomy lectures during their first semester?"

Check the question with three tests

Read the finished question and ask:

• Can I collect the data in the time I have?
• Can a reader tell who is being studied, where, and what is being measured?
• Does the question lead directly to a method, and could I explain that method in two sentences?

If any answer is no, the question still needs work.

Do not narrow too far

A question can also be too narrow. "Do the 12 teachers at my school like the new timetable?" is answerable, but it cannot support conclusions beyond one school, and a committee may ask what the study contributes. The target is a question that your project can answer fully and that matters to someone beyond you.

Carry the change through the rest of the document

A narrower question changes the document that depends on it. Your problem statement, your purpose statement, and your research design all refer to the question, and each must now describe the same study. Our guide to writing the problem and purpose statements shows how they connect.

Send your supervisor the new question before you rewrite everything else. One short email confirming the direction costs you a day and can save you a chapter.

Not sure the narrowed question holds up?

A Research Design and Methodology Review from The Two Dissertation Moms reads your question, sample, and method together and tells you where they do not line up.