This video illustrates how to take a topic and use the 5Ws to create a more focused research question. Using the 5Ws to Develop a Research Questions (2:57) – New Literacies Alliance
Sleep habits
Who: college students
What: academic success
Most scholarly research examines fairly narrow topics and looks at relationships between concepts. For example, sleep habits is a broad topic, but looking at the relationship between sleep habits and academic success might be a more manageable topic.
My new question might be: "How do sleep habits affect the academic success of college students?"
But how did I get there? I did have to do some pre-research to find an angle, but the W/H method helped me brainstorm possibilities to investigate. After some quick searching, I saw that there were articles related to this topic. I had to try it out before committing to this investigation. I can possibly expand my review to include how to combat poor sleep patterns.
The overall research question serves as my guide.