LEAP 1100 Fall 2021 - Professor Borup

All research begins with a question - Why is the sky blue? Does aspirin ease headache pain? - and the process of answering that question is just as important as the result. Building a well-formed question directs your information search and helps you support or disprove your argument or hypothesis.

Questions to ask as you build your research:

• Who or what am I researching?
• What is the event or change that I’m looking at?
• What caused the event or change?
• Is there a comparison that I can use?
• How can I measure the parts of my question?
• Has this been researched before? How?
• Why is this research important?

Focusing your research:

• Specify your specific concern or issue.
• Decide what you want to know about the specific concern or issue.
• Turn what you want to know and the specific concern into a question.
• Ensure that the question is answerable.
• Check to make sure the question is not too broad or too narrow.

PICO is tool for framing an evidence-based research inquiry. It is used primarily in the Health Sciences, but can be applied to any systematic research that involves solving a problem or answering a question by using an intervention.

The acronym stands for:

P – Patient, Problem or Population

I – Intervention

C – Comparison or control

O – Outcome