Some Ideas about Research Questions

I have been teaching Finance courses at bachelor level at Universidad Privada del Norte (UPN) in northern Peru. The orientation UPN had until 2012 was more technical rather than scientific. After that and in order to implement the changes in Peruvian Universities Law regarding to accreditation requisites, UPN incorporate improvements in the curricula in order to handle with research courses.

I was challenge by my college Jeaneth Sanchez to implement research competence in the Investment Finance course I teach. As a consequence, since last year I redesigned the course in order to complement the main subject with research activities. My reflection after three semesters of trial and testing are summarize as follow:

1. In order to help students to develop good research questions at bachelor level it is important to start with helping them to interpret and understand literature, as many of them, have not been close to any research field before my course. In order to do this, I design five questions: What is the purpose of the authors? What is the theory frame in which the authors based their research? What are the methodologic processes applied in the study? What are the main results? What implications have the authors’ results for my local context?
2. From the literature review, students are ready to start drawing research questions. UPN recommends a research plan format in order to writing dawn ideas like: the research question, hypothesis and research objectives, the justification of the research question, additional literature that need to be reviewed, resources required for the research project, databases or information to be reveled, among other administrative information required.
3. We make follow up of research plans using a Gantt Chart in order to make sure students finish their research on time.

This experience was interesting, as new personal research questions come up in helping students with theirs. At the moment I am interesting in researching “What is the influence of firms’ reputation in their finance structure and their market value?”

The importance of this question is: There are few researches in Peruvian literature about this subject, there is a lack of stakeholders’ misinterpretation about firm’s reputation and data available has not been properly explored.