research – R3ciprocity Blog

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Is This A Good Research Question? (Online Quiz)

This is a online quiz to help you decide whether your research question is good, and should be pursued. Knowing what is a good research question is challenging, and most people do not know if they have a good research question or not before they begin. This is an online quiz to help you self-assess whether you believe you should pursue the research question.

Do you have a good research question? Should you even start doing research with that research question? There is a lot of work involved in doing research, and you should likely use this online quiz to see if you should start the research project. I created this decision tool / quiz to help you make that decision.

I created the R3ciprocity project to help us do better research and be better writers. I wanted to create a software / movement that was nice to others. Of course, my goal is to help you, no matter who you are. Look me up if you are interested. Enjoy! If you want to buy credits on r3ciprocity.com to get help with your writing and research, click this link.
– David Maslach

Purpose:

In June 2021, I polled the R3ciprocity community on YouTube on “How do you know that you have a good research question?” This community is primarily based on PhDs, professors, and potential PhDs. (If you want to help validate any of these measures, and want to conduct experiments, let me know). 901 responses are included in this poll.

Privacy and Legal Stuff:
That being said, this is not based on research, and is only for fun only. Everything on the R3ciprocity community that aids research will be fully-vetted by Institutional Review Boards, and Ethics Board; and you will have consent.

At this moment, this is just for fun. By clicking and proceeding with the online survey, you realize and give consent that this is just for fun, and will not be used for research purposes, and this information will not be sold to third-parties.

Method:
This is based on a weighted average of your responses, based on the following questions:
1.What are the most important features of a research question?
2. What is the most important aspect of a research question?
3. How do you know that you have a good research question?

I selected the top three items from each question to create this quiz. These are items that most people believe are important for good research questions.

The items are based on a simple likert scale of how you believe you stand with your application.

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How To Increase Your Research Productivity?: Take The Academic Research Productivity Quiz

How should you increase your academic research productivity? This quiz was crowd-sourced from the R3ciprocity YouTube community. The community primarily consists of potential PhDs, PhD students, and professors. The goal of the quiz is to assess the academic research potential of people. It is to help them predict their research productivity in the future. The questions where generated by 172 responses from the community.

As of right now, this is meant for personal use only. It is meant to help you make decisions and have fun, but the free scale and it’s validity is worth exactly what you paid for it.

Research Methodology:

I initially prompted the community about what aspects of their career will make them a more productive researcher. Here, academic research productivity refers to the number and quality of academic research journal articles. I asked a series of quizzes related to many aspects of academic research productivity. From there, I took the 3 most popular items from the quizzes. I then created a scale based on the sum of each response related to a 5-point Likert scale. This scaled was developed in March 2020, and is subject to being updated and validated in the future.

There are a 23 items in the quiz. Polls that generated the items were based on the most popular responses to polls from the community. The polls were related to motivations, university resources, PhD opportunity costs, preferences for PhDs, and the skills required for academic research productivity success.

The key distinction with this test is that these items are based on inputs, and not the outputs of doing a PhD (e.g., your publication record or position at a university). If you want to help with validating this scale and you want to develop this into a paper, please contact David Maslach to access the data. (Only serious inquiries only.)