My research question is "Is exposure therapy an effective way for dealing with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder?"

Developing research questions and hypotheses are perhaps the most important first steps to the research process. This week, you will look more closely at this vital part of research and how you can go about developing quality research ideas, questions, and hypotheses. Let's begin by answering the following questions.

Provide an analysis of how your own experience, unsystematic and systematic observation, theory, and applied issues can help you to develop sound research ideas. See if you can generate a few research questions of your own here (perhaps with an eye towards developing one of these questions into your research proposal), and share the source of your idea with the class. Evaluate the quality of your research question based on the following criteria:

• Is the question directly answerable?
• Is the question empirically based?
• Does the question use operational definitions to define variables?
• Does the question ask something important?
• How could you revise your original research question to better meet these criteria?

Finally, describe how a research question differs from a hypothesis.