Identifying, Selecting, and Defining Research Questions

Professor Geoffrey Wall reflects on fifty years of tourism scholarship to offer practical guidance on identifying, selecting, and defining research questions. Published in Tourism Recreation Research, the paper argues that the early steps of research, choosing topics and narrowing them into manageable questions, deserve more systematic attention than they typically receive.

Finding a research topic

Prof. Wall argues that research topics should be actively sought, not waited for. He suggests several practical methods for finding them: drawing on personal interests, hobbies, travel, and other life experiences; keeping abreast of current affairs and reading widely; building from practical experiences in the field; reading the limitations sections of existing papers, where authors often point to gaps and opportunities for further research; and brainstorming, ideally in a group setting where ideas can be tested and built on collectively.

Narrowing topics into questions

Once a topic is chosen, the paper proposes Venn diagrams and hourglass diagrams as tools for narrowing scope to a defined research question. The Venn diagram helps visualise overlaps between concepts: for example, heritage, tourism economics, and a specific location, with the research question sitting at the intersection. Most worthwhile research areas, Prof. Wall notes, involve relationships between tourism and other subjects (medical tourism, agritourism, and so on) rather than tourism alone.

The hourglass diagram mirrors the structure of a typical research paper: broad subjects in the introduction, narrowing through key concepts and bodies of literature, into a specific research question and the chosen study site, and then widening again through findings, discussion, and conclusions that return to the broader themes. The shape itself becomes a guide for both the research and the eventual write-up.

The role of supervisors

Prof. Wall argues that helping students choose and refine research topics is one of the most important tasks of a graduate supervisor. He shares anecdotes from his own experience as both student and mentor, illustrating how thoughtful, supportive engagement at this early stage can shape the trajectory of a young scholar's career. He advocates for the writing and revising of concise summaries (one page, then a paragraph, then a sentence) as a useful intermediate task that forces clarity about what the research is really about.