Guide

This isn’t a guide on how to write a bibliography according to academic writing rules. You can find that with a quick Google search. This guide is better, because it teaches you how to cite your sources without the burdensome writing process. The key idea is – write your sources as you go. We often encounter students who start writing a chapter, and in order not to delay the writing, they add a link or a word that reminds them that a source needs to be mentioned here. This is a mistake that will give you a headache at the end of the work, when you have to start searching for the articles you used back then. So, first – write in-text citations as you go. It will give you peace of mind and a sense of relief when you are at the end of writing. The second tip is to write the source directly into the bibliography as well, as you go. This helps in two ways – first, it saves you a lot of time at the end of the writing. Imagine having to go through the entire work, page by page, and start writing the bibliography, when the paper is due tomorrow. Don’t forget that a research paper can include over 50 sources.  Moreover, students often unintentionally omit an article or citation. This is a violation of the rules of ethics and academic writing. Often, it will also lower your grade if the professor notices it. Finally, pay attention to which citation style you should write, MLA or APA. If you can choose, always choose APA as it is simpler and more visually pleasing than footnotes at the bottom of the page. Now that everything is clear and set, it’s time to start writing your research paper! Or go out with friends and use RikiGPT instead (wink).

Well, first, why not write the introduction in the beginning? It might be a bit confusing, but our suggestion is that the best introduction is written at the end of the research paper, not in the beginning. The reason is that by the end of the work, you already know everything about the paper; you know what you wrote in the literature review and which studies you discussed, you know which research method you chose, who your research population was, you know who your interviewees were and what conclusions were drawn. All these make up an introduction. Writing an introduction will be similar to the opening of your summary chapter, only here it will be a more comprehensive and short review of the work’s structure. You need to present what you will discuss in each chapter of the work. A good introduction will be up to 2 pages long, no less than a page and a half. At the end of presenting the work’s structure, it’s advisable to talk about why you chose to engage with the topic – how it relates to you or why it’s important to discuss it. After writing the introduction, you have just a little bit left. Writing the abstract, or executive summary, is not mandatory, but we can give you the best reason why to add an abstract: an abstract turns your 20-page paper into a 20 pages a half paper. And if you think we’re joking, we’re not – the abstract makes your research paper more professional and high-quality, and more importantly, shows your professor how good you are at summarizing things compellingly. An abstract consists of a single paragraph that concisely talks about the topic of your work and what conclusions we find at the end of the paper. Now, all that’s left is to organize the paper. Write the titles correctly where they need to be. Add page numbers. Ensure that the research paper meets all the technical guidelines: font size, font type, line spacing, margins, etc. Pay attention to the line spacing – many students start with double spacing and then find out they were supposed to write according to a 1.5 spacing, so they now have a few more pages to add… don’t do that. At this stage, many students forget that they were supposed to write a bibliography as well, which makes the writing a bit more daunting. In the next chapter, we will give you some good tips for writing a bibliography and citing sources within the work.

We’ve arrived at the most fun part of writing a research paper—the point where you feel like it’s almost over. It’s important to note that it’s not quite finished yet because we still need an introduction and an abstract… but yes, you’re very close.  So, what should a summary include? Very briefly—write again what the subject of the work was and the research question. Recap your research method, the conclusions, and the weaknesses of the research. It has to be short and to the point—2 to 3 concise and clear paragraphs. The next part of the summary is the interesting one. Here you need to discuss what you would recommend investigating in the future in the context of your topic. For example: if some of your findings were not statistically significant enough to claim a correlation, suggest to the professor reading your work that in the future, it would be better to conduct a more in-depth study that spans a larger sample. Or, recommend researching the topic you investigated again, focusing on other explanatory variables.  The next step in the summary chapter is to provide a brief personal reflection. Sometimes, lecturers will require you to write an additional chapter of reflection, but if not, add this in the summary. It’s important to mention that even if you didn’t really gain additional insights or even enjoyed the research process, don’t mention that—rather, talk about how much “examining the connection between success in building a 3D LEGO model and the sense of personal fulfillment among 5-year-olds” satisfied and taught you a lot. And remember, RikiGPT can also easily write a discussion chapter and draw conclusions in an academic and high-quality manner. Whether it’s integrating findings, suggesting future research directions, or providing personal reflections, Riki’s advanced capabilities can enhance your research paper to reflect thorough understanding and insight, while saving you considerable effort in the final stages of writing.

We’ve reached the heart of your research paper—the chapter that determines whether you’ve made a good integration between the literature review and your findings. Remember when we mentioned in the review chapter that one article does not support your research hypothesis? Now’s the time to talk about it. Remember some subjects chose not to answer two questions? Now’s the time to discuss that too. Actually, anything that can explain the data you’ve received will be welcomed with open arms and with some bonus points for your grade. Firstly, it’s recommended to start with the main conclusions obtained in the study. Don’t just mention “the hypothesis was confirmed” but add the conclusion drawn: “The conclusion is that the higher a person’s financial literacy, the less they will engage in online consumption habits, meaning, they will make fewer online consumer purchases.” Go through all your hypotheses like this, write down even the ones that were not confirmed and the conclusions that arise from them. This is just the opening of the chapter, and now you have to provide explanations. A good explanation will examine all aspects of your conclusions. For example, you need to address the reasons why you believe you’ve come to the conclusion that high financial literacy reduces internet consumption. This is the time to review again the various studies on reducing consumption among people who monitor their monthly expenses, and it’s even better to add a few more studies that you haven’t discussed before. This usually happens when you get results you weren’t prepared for. It doesn’t mean your work isn’t good, quite the opposite; it’s a great opportunity to show your discussion skills. For example, if you found a very weak link between financial literacy and internet consumption habits, maybe you can now bring in articles and studies that strengthen the weak link found, which can provide a very good explanation for the non-significant findings. But if not these, there could be other reasons that lead to flawed research. It happens to quite a few researchers, so not to worry. In this case, you can discuss the problems you think lead to the errors. Maybe your sample population wasn’t random enough? Perhaps it would have been better to conduct interviews instead of distributing questionnaires? Or maybe the variables you chose to investigate confused your entire research. The main thing is to discuss it. It’s also very important to mention in the discussion alternative explanations for the findings you’ve received. For example, internet consumption habits could also be explained not only by high financial literacy but also by age or gender. For example, people over 50 might prefer to shop in physical stores rather than people under 30, and that’s even if both age groups have high financial literacy. But more importantly, RikiGPT can also draft the discussion chapter and draw conclusions perfectly, in minutes. Riki can synthesize all your chapters into a cohesive narrative that not only upholds the highest academic requirements but also provides insights that can push the academic conversation further. Or even insights you wouldn’t have been able to think about yourself. Just provide RikiGPT with the necessary inputs, and she can help conclude your research paper with unmatched thoroughness and accuracy. Again, remember that the discussion and conclusion chapters are the final product of your work and are one of the most crucial aspects for assessing your work. Also, remember that there isn’t necessarily a connection between the discussion chapter and the summary chapter. Many tend to get it confused, so we’ve prepared a short guide on it called “Summing It All Up.” You’re welcome.

Let’s start with the important question – what exactly did you get? If it’s an empirical research paper, what you’ve got is a number, or more precisely, a statistic, and you need to explain this data. Here’s an example of how to interpret statistical data significance based on Pearson’s correlation coefficient: The values range between -1 and 1, where 1 indicates a strong positive relationship, and -1 indicates a strong negative relationship. The closer the numerical value is to either end of the spectrum, the stronger the correlation. Here’s a table explaining the received values: From Value To Value Interpretation of Received Value -1 -0.9 Very strong negative correlation -0.9 -0.7 Strong negative correlation -0.7 -0.4 Moderate negative correlation -0.4 -0.2 Weak negative correlation -0.2 0 Very weak or negligible negative correlation 0 0.2 Very weak or negligible positive correlation 0.2 0.4 Weak positive correlation 0.4 0.7 Moderate positive correlation 0.7 0.9 Strong positive correlation 0.9 1 Very strong positive correlation Additional data such as statistical significance level, standard deviation, degrees of freedom, etc., also need to be considered. However, it’s worth noting that when we’re dealing with writing a research paper, the writing process, data collection, selection of articles, understanding the findings, writing discussions and conclusions, and creating a high-quality integration between the chapters are what will ultimately determine your grade. Although we don’t diminish the importance of quality statistical inference, (on the contrary, we are quite fans of it), we recommend focusing on the way you write and conduct your research. After understanding the statistical significance of your findings, it’s time to write them down in the findings chapter. It’s recommended to add tables that outline the correlation coefficient and briefly summarize the received findings. Here’s an example of how to write findings: Table 9: Correlation between Purchasing Food Products and Positive Recommendations Purchasing Food Products Positive Recommendations Purchasing Food Products 1 **0.794 Positive Recommendations 1 **p<.01 From the findings (Table 9), it is evident that there is a significant positive relationship between the purchase of food products and numerous positive recommendations from consumers (p<.01, rp = 0.794). In other words, the more positive the recommendations, the more likely people will buy the food. The hypothesis is confirmed. But what happens when we’re dealing with theoretical findings? Or the question of all questions – how do you extract findings from endless interview transcripts? And here we go back to the beginning – building coherent and well-structured interview questions based on your hypotheses, which will give you more organization and clarity when you come to extract your findings. Our recommendation is to prepare several aspects that came up in the interviews. For example, if you asked, “What are the challenges faced by members of the Ethiopian community in integrating into society?” We can extract from the question itself the themes we hypothesize will emerge: Discrimination Community and cohesion Education Socioeconomic status Family support, and more. Now, it will be easier for us to extract the relevant quotes from the interviews at our disposal. We’ll categorize the quotes according to the themes and create a wonderful findings chapter that contains quotes, conclusions, and everything divided, organized, and most importantly – pleasant and easy to read. And what about the findings chapter in a theoretical work? Well, the heart of the theoretical work is the findings. For example, if we wanted to list off the reasons for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we can divide the chapters according to the reasons that lead to the findings of the work. All that remains is to move straight to the discussion and conclusion chapters.

This part is nicknamed the “student scare” phase, and it’s a pity it’s seen this way because this is where everything you’ve done—the research, writing, interviews, edits, and everything in between—culminates in a single moment of clicking “Calculate Match” in SPSS. And almost always, we end up with a perfect correlation of 0.895 with high statistical significance and a huge smile on our faces. We’ve cracked the connection between drinking coffee in the morning and an increase in alertness. Or something like that. This typically happens because you’ve played a bit with the data to fit your hypotheses, but that’s a story for another chapter 😉 So let’s get to it. How do you perform statistical inference? It would be hard to give a comprehensive guide without making you want to sleep (as if you’re not already there), so we’ll list the important points in a “do’s and don’ts” —everything you need to know about statistical inference in a research paper.  First, try not to overdo data collection. A large amount of data requires a more professional and meticulous filtering of the sample, and you don’t really have the capacity to do that. Create a small, quality sample and try to draw conclusions about a limited population. Like in our example, about political science students. Second, construct a questionnaire with coherent hypotheses. For example, if we want to check the financial literacy level of women in the lower-income areas, we could ask questions like: Is it important for you to thoroughly read the paperwork you sign at the bank? Is it important for you to track your expenses during the month? In these questions, the statements would range from “not at all” to “very much so.” Be careful of questions that create numerical mismatches with each other. For example:  Is it important for you to thoroughly read the paperwork you sign at the bank? Do you think it’s okay to forego monthly expense tracking? If the respondent has high financial literacy, she would answer the first question with “5”, meaning “very much so”, and the second question with “1”, meaning “not at all”. This creates a numerical mismatch that will lead to problems in the overall match test at the end of the study. The next step is data collection. You can create an online questionnaire using Google’s perfect platform https://www.google.com/forms/about/ and distribute it to subjects. Here we want to emphasize that good statistical research strives for as much randomness as possible. But in our specific case, it’s pretty hard to choose samples randomly, so there are several ways to work around this. If, for example, we want to sample political science students, we would publish our questionnaire in the Facebook or WhatsApp groups of the major. We are somewhat deviating from randomness, but not too much, and that’s exactly what we need for our little research paper. The next step will be to extract the data received and re-record it in Excel. It is very important to record the data uniformly. For example, if we collected data on the question “Number of years of study”, we strive to record numbers rather than the word “two years”. In addition, we want to convert verbal data like “female” to be “1” and “male” to be “0”. If you organize the data this way and watch for mismatches in the form, you will prevent significant errors. The next step is to transfer the data to statistical inference software. We really like to use the SPSS software, but there are other good software options like JASP, JAMOVI, and more. Also, it’s worth knowing that Excel is as good of a platform for checking variable matches in a simple way. The last step is to produce output findings. The findings output will be based on choosing the correlation coefficient, whether it’s Pearson, Spearman, Cramer, and more. (It’s important to know in advance which correlation coefficient you will use to tailor the questionnaires and data accordingly.) After you’ve received the desired tables, it’s time to analyze them and explain to the reader what the results were, and to yourself along the way… Actually, using tools like RikiGPT can drastically ease the effort in creating the methodology chapter of your research paper. Just provide RikiGPT with your research data and specifics of your desired research method, and Riki will craft an entire chapter in a minute. This capability allows you to focus more on the analysis and less on drafting lengthy descriptions, making your academic work both efficient and effective. If we decided to do qualitative research instead of quantitative, then one of the key steps is conducting a theme analysis. So, what exactly are themes? Themes are like the gold in your mountain of data; they are patterns or topics that keep appearing in the conversations, interviews, or text collections. Essentially, they represent the core ideas that repeatedly surface and are critical in understanding the underlying ideas in the data. Analyzing themes involves sifting through your data to identify these repeating patterns, which can reveal insights about perceptions, experiences, and more. It’s a bit like detective work, where you’re piecing together clues to form a coherent picture of the information you’ve gathered. Now, imagine if you could speed up this lengthy process with a dash of AI magic. Enter ChatGPT, which you can use to lighten your analysis load. By simply uploading the transcript of your interviews to ChatGPT, you can ask it to extract themes for you. Then, the AI does the heavy lifting by scanning through your data, identifying and pulling out the recurring topics. It’s like having a super-smart assistant who can read through pages of conversation and highlight the important bits in no time. This not only saves hours of manual coding and note-taking, but also ensures you don’t miss out on any subtle themes that might be easy to overlook. After ChatGPT pulls out the relevant themes and quotes for you, you can send everything to RikiGPT and she

The Research method chapter of a research paper, or in our favorite word – “methodology” (always sounds smarter) – is usually the first chapter that those who skip from the abstract over the introduction and literature review will read. Typically, it’s constructed very clearly and precisely and to the point. We’ve encountered quite a few students who stretch the methodology chapter across more than three pages. In our opinion, there’s no need to write so much, unless you have a very specific method you devised yourself and it’s important to present it in great detail, because maybe one day you’ll receive a prestigious academic award for devising the best indicator for assessing the quality of Picasso’s paintings. In any case, write the methodology chapter clearly and concisely. The subsections of the methodology chapter should follow this structure: Proposed Research Method Research Question Research Variables Research Population Sample and Demographic Characteristics of the Sample Research Hypotheses You may add and expand on these and add subchapters about the weaknesses of the research, ethics, studies that support your choice of research method, but not more than that. This is an important chapter that needs to be easily and clearly understandable. The research method you chose shapes the methodology chapter in a research paper. For example, if you choose a research method based on collecting questionnaires and ask, “Does higher education increase the likelihood of divorce?”, typically you will discuss how you are investigating the effects of the variables based on Pearson correlation (one of the correlations we really like). You will also add how you collected the data and how you created statistical inferences. You will also talk about your sample population, and present (preferably through output tables) the demographic data of the subjects, such as gender, average age, education, place of residence, average years of marriage, family status, number of children, etc. Remember, you need to include the demographic data at the beginning of the questionnaire you distribute to the subjects. If your research method is based on interviews, it is advisable to discuss the demographic data of the interviewees, the questions asked, how the interview was conducted, if anything interfered with the interview, what strengthened or weakened the reliability of the interviewees, the ethical research practices, and of course, remember to maintain the anonymity of your interviewees. If you wrote a theoretical paper without empirical research, writing the research method, if for example it involves a comparative study between countries, will be a sub-chapter in the introduction of the work where you will present the structure of the work and what you are going to discuss to establish your findings and conclusions. Making this process more efficient and using recent innovation, simply provide RikiGPT with your research data and request a chapter on research methods, she will write an entire chapter in a minute! This feature significantly simplifies one of the most challenging parts of academic writing. Using AI like RikiGPT, students and researchers can focus more on their data gathering and analysis and less on the time-consuming process of writing detailed methodology sections. RikiGPT can handle the entire methodology chapter based on the input parameters and research requirements you set, turning a complex task into a straightforward one. This not only saves time but also ensures that the methodological framework is robust and well-articulated, ready for any scholarly scrutiny. Tired? Well we are just halfway through; the next chapter will delve into quality statistical inference.

We argue that this is the easiest part of the paper—apologies for the bragging, but maybe that’s because we’ve gotten quite good at it. So, we thought we’d share a perfect literature review that we did, and together we’ll analyze it. Topic: The relationship between phonological awareness and emotional maturity in first grade. Let’s start by building a framework for the literature review: First, we’ll begin the review by repeating the variables and the question to enhance understanding of why we’re discussing these topics in the review. Not mandatory, but it helps the reader. “As mentioned, this work examines whether there’s a relationship between phonological awareness and emotional maturity in first grade. The research hypothesis is that the higher the phonological awareness, the higher the level of emotional maturity in first grade. This literature review will present several definitions of phonological awareness and then review a number of studies dealing with readiness and emotional maturity in first grade regarding all characteristics and variables related to phonological awareness.” It’s crucial to include explanations of the concepts and theories you’ll need for the rest of the work in your literature review; these will serve you later in the critical discussion chapter of your research paper. For example: “Often, people think reading begins by learning the sounds of letters. However, many children start reading long before they understand that letters represent sounds. A basic component of language skill is called phonological awareness. Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to identify and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words, such as identifying rhyming words, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, identifying the syllables in a word, and more. Phonological awareness includes a sequence of skills that develop over time and are vital for the success of reading and spelling since they are central to learning decoding and spelling words. Phonological awareness is particularly important in the early stages of reading development—in kindergarten and first grade (Carroll et al., 2003). Proper development of phonological awareness in these early years can prevent future reading problems for many students. However, at any age, it is definitely possible to work on phonological awareness.” Ensure your writing is pleasant and clear, with a good flow in between paragraphs. Examples of transition phrases between paragraphs could be “However, in this context, contrary to what was said, in relation to the previous paragraph, similar to the discussed research, in contrast,” etc. Here’s an example: “Alongside this, the five vital areas for school readiness are: social and emotional development, learning abilities, language and literacy, cognition and general knowledge, and physical development and health. When we talk about “school readiness,” we picture children learning letters and numbers, colors, shapes, and traditional learning skills. However, according to Zins et al. (2004), recent decades of research on school readiness have unequivocally shown that children’s social and emotional development is of central importance to success in school.” It’s vital to base your arguments in the review on existing academic research. Quality studies from recent years will make your review professional and well-founded. Do not hesitate to write about studies conducted in the same field you are researching, even if they found different results, as this will give you a good foundation for the discussion that comes at the end of your research paper. “Proylich et al. (2010) examined whether phonological awareness is a predictor of reading and writing skills among young children. The study tested 188 children with phonological awareness difficulties and behavioral issues. It found that children with lower levels of phonological awareness have more emotional problems, are more hyperactive, and have more issues with their peers than children with higher levels of phonological awareness. Another study confirmed the relationship between phonological awareness and early language skills. The study compared two groups of children aged 4: one with advanced speech and language skills and the other with low phonological skills. Each group received tests that measured formulation level, vocabulary, literacy, and phonological skills… (Rvachew et al, 2003).” Lastly, if you have variables that need to be quantitatively measured, it is advisable to write definitions for your variables in the review and explain why you chose to define the variables this way based on academic articles.  Moreover, embracing AI tools like RikiGPT can drastically streamline the entire process of conducting a literature review, no matter the type of research you’re doing. Over the past year, RikiGPT has proven capable of synthesizing and organizing information from hundreds of theoretical papers, simplifying the painstaking task of literature collection and review, and yet maintaining high academic standards. Professors have consistently enjoyed the essay without realizing RikiGPT had a hand in it, which exemplifies the seamless integration of AI in enhancing academic productivity.

Welcome to the segment on “What type of paper should you write?” Right off the bat, your professor might dictate the type, and that will save you the trouble here. But there are a few fortunate students who get the privilege to choose for themselves! Here’s a brief guide on what each type of paper entails, and then you can choose whichever is most suitable for your research. By the way, we look forward to announcing the winner of the “Best Paper that will almost surely earn you an A.” It’s worth reading to the end. Qualitative or Theoretical Research:  Such a paper involves a lot of words. It’s essential to understand that you will have a lot to read, sift through, write, and very little time to rest. Each chapter in this work is based on extensive text, but not just any text—paragraph after paragraph where each integrates at least two articles, arranged in chronological order and in line with the previous paragraph, ultimately answering the sub-chapter, which answers the chapter, which answers the overall research question, which ties back to the topic. It’s kind of like a Matryoshka doll (we’re smart enough to know not to say Babushka). One crucial aspect of this work is to maintain coherent and focused writing that does not deviate into other subjects. It can be a comparative study, for example, a paper comparing Kabbalistic Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism (yes, there are super interesting papers about this topic), or a historical paper discussing the factors that led to World War I (Franz Ferdinand would say it wasn’t his fault). There’s also theoretical research reviewing various financial reports and how they affect stock market fluctuations (our favorite topic). In general, a good theoretical paper focuses on the topic you chose and has high-quality writing that builds up your answer to the research question. We’ll now focus on another type of theoretical work, namely “Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Research: Essentially, papers dealing with comparisons or historical aspects could be considered qualitative research, but our intention here is to discuss research based on qualitative data like interviews. The reason we focus on interviews is that most of the data we’ve collected indicates that many papers are based on interview-driven research. We don’t know why, but you seem to love conducting interviews. It’s important to understand that interviews are based on a quality literature review and also on creating a set of questions, whether structured or open-ended, in-depth questionnaires, semi-structured questionnaires, etc., where the responses to these questions produce a good alignment between the research question and our hypotheses. For instance, we decided to focus our research on African American women and their career trajectories. We’re curious about the challenges these educated women face when seeking employment after graduation. We hypothesize that these challenges may stem from systemic discrimination, societal expectations, early family responsibilities, and more.  To examine these challenges, we will prepare an interview in advance that we know will be good enough so that the interviewees’ responses will provide strong validation for our final answer in the discussion chapter of the paper. Sometimes we are not always sure we have the capacity or time to sit with people one-on-one to conduct interviews. Therefore, nothing is faster than distributing empirical questionnaires to 180 single men and women in New York to find out why they haven’t found a partner yet. Say hello to empirical research work. Empirical Seminar Paper: Or in other words, “Do I need to learn SPSS now?” The answer is yes, you need to know how to work with statistical inference software, but sometimes Excel can help with checking simple correlations (our little secret—Excel can create a decent statistical analysis for a quality research paper). But before you enter data into the software, you need to actually have data! The structure here is similar to before: a good research question based on quantifiable variables (even love and dating despair can be quantitatively measured), and a good literature review including various studies in the field (for example, what is late singleness? The challenges of finding a partner in the center versus the periphery, and more). However, unlike theoretical or qualitative works, here you’ll need to fill the remaining required pages with tables, which is great because it takes up space, but still requires a bit more precision and realistic thinking. So now all that’s left is for you to pray you get a high enough correlation to declare “The reason singles in New York can’t find partners is because they live in New York!” Even though almost everyone thinks that, at least you will have a table to prove it, and in SPSS! Nice, isn’t it? And now, as promised, the results of the competition for the “Best Paper that will almost surely earn you an A”: First place – Empirical research paper. Little prose, lots of data, little room for error and lack of focus. Second place – Qualitative research paper based on interviews. Similar to empirical research, but here your interviewees have given you their words as a gift. Third and last place – Theoretical seminar paper. We’re sorry to disappoint you. Although these can be very interesting to write, many students get lost and stray into various directions, and professors notice this, especially when you start with “This work will discuss the causes of the expulsion of the Jews of Spain” and end with “The conclusion is that the Jews of Spain should have obtained a Portuguese passport.” It doesn’t really flow. And now, let’s talk about the magic of AI in the world of academia, especially in crafting theoretical papers. Enter RikiGPT, our trusty AI tool that’s been nothing short of revolutionary over the past year. Riki’s been busy at work, churning out hundreds of theoretical papers. The cool part? All these papers went through with high grades and glowing comments from graders, who had no clue it was RikiGPT writing it! This little secret highlights not only the power

Let’s dive straight in—what makes a good research question? Well, the answer is both simple and not so simple. Suppose you chose to delve into political science, which suggests you’re eyeing a future in politics, ideally backed by a degree (no specific jab intended, of course). Now, let’s discuss a challenging question in this domain: U.S.-Russia relations, which we find quite intriguing. Now that we have our topic, let’s ask a question: “Are U.S.-Russia relations good?” You can see that the question is somewhat limited in its answer scope, allowing for a simple “yes” or “no”. Although this is a start, it’s still not enough, especially not for writing a comprehensive and high-quality paper based merely on “yes” or “no”. So, let’s refine our research question a bit. Suppose we think the answer is “no”. Some of you might be raising your eyebrows right now, but trust us—we aren’t the first to write about poor relations between the U.S. and Russia, as the saying “every question has an answer” almost always holds true in academic research. Now that we have an answer to our original question, we begin to construct our research proposal. We’ve crafted an initial hypothesis in the context that “U.S.-Russia relations are not good,” and now we need to support our hypothesis, meaning the work will need to examine all the factors and aspects explaining why U.S.-Russia relations aren’t good. It’s advisable to start by searching Google or, if you really like sitting there, in a library, for all the issues that came up during the history of the two countries; slowly begin collecting all the information to produce a solid answer to your question. We’ll move a bit forward in the process and say you’ve found that during Obama’s presidency, there were quite a few diplomatic conflicts and struggles, unlike during Bush’s time when U.S.-Russia relations were much better. Here’s where the magic happens—without realizing it, we’ve crafted a challenging, interesting, and high-quality research question:  “What factors explain the deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations during Obama’s presidency compared to Bush’s?”  Perfect, right? From here, we’ll begin building the chapters of our work that will survey all the factors we’ve found, or those we think are good enough to answer the question. But what if our work isn’t theoretical, but an empirical one filled with numbers and variables, things we’re a bit uncomfortable with since we’ve primarily studied political science and “what does it have to do with stats?” Many professors or courses require you to submit an empirical work based on questionnaires. In this case, it’s crucial to understand the components of the research question so that the practical aspect is as precise as possible. At Virtuai LLC, we love challenges, so we’ll try to build an empirical research question for a theoretical field. Staying with U.S.-Russia relations, let’s go back to the original research question—”What factors explain the deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations during Obama’s presidency compared to Bush’s?” We think it would be interesting to know what the public thinks about Obama’s presidency. The problem is that we can’t really generalize about the entire public if we hadn’t counted everyone. We might need to narrow down our research population a bit, maybe asking, “What do students think?” Another issue that arises is that it’s very difficult to get definitive findings. Think about it – a political science student might think one thing, while a chemistry student thinks something completely different. Therefore, we’ll try to narrow down our research population even more and ask, “What do political science students think?” Now, we have a narrowed down, quality research population that we can physically approach. Let’s think about what we want to know—are we interested in what political science students think about the Obama administration? Perhaps more specifically—we’d like to know if political science students are satisfied with U.S.-Russia relations during the Obama administration? Many questions can be asked about such a specific topic. But before we ask the question, let’s try to understand what trends we want to examine. Suppose we want to explore whether there’s a change in opinions between first-year and third-year political science students. Perhaps this way we can deduce the impacts of political science studies on students’ political opinions. Interesting, ain’t it? A good research question in this context would ask: “Do studies in political science influence political opinions between first-year and third-year students?” And now we have two variables: Dependent variable: Year in the political science program. Independent variable: Political opinions. Our research method in this context is questionnaires on a specific topic—general opinions on the nature of U.S.-Russia relations during the Obama administration to 20 first-year students and 20 third-year students studying at the same educational institution. To be even more precise, we’ll try to minimize the effects of indirect variables like gender, age, place of residence, etc., but that’s for the more experienced among us. Now the next question is, which study method should we choose? Qualitative research or empirical research? To find out, move on to the next chapter of our incredible guide!