In order to turn your idea into a question that can be researched, you need to be clear and specific on a number of issues, both clinical and practical.

You will have a general idea about what patient group you are interested in but you may need to define more precisely who your patients are. This will enable you to develop the inclusion and exclusion criteria for your study. Some of the issues to consider are age group, the particular problem or behaviour, the length of time with the problem, other concurrent illnesses, social situation, and so on.

You also need to be clear about the problem these patients have that you want to address. You may wish to try a new way of treating something, or simply gain a better understanding of the problem. Clarify exactly what you are trying to achieve by addressing this problem and describe your rationale for the proposed treatment or why this exploration is important.

If you are testing a new treatment you need to be precise about what this will be and how it is different to what you usually do. If your research is about describing or exploring a problem, you need to think through how you will measure or observe what is happening.

The following three examples demonstrate how a general question can be clarified and in some cases this results in several questions which need to be researched separately. In each example the specific question describes the patient group and the problem precisely. At this stage the ‘how’ may be less clear to you.

Example 1

General: Does adding fish oil to nutritional supplements help COPD patients maintain their weight better?