Why it matters when you are writing
The diagnostic is simple and unforgiving: describe the result that would answer your question. If you cannot picture the table, the figure, or the passage that settles it, the question is still a topic. “How does social media affect students?” fails the test. “Does daily short-form video use predict self-reported sleep latency among first-year undergraduates?” passes, because you can see what the answer looks like.
Scope is where most projects go wrong, and it usually goes wrong in the ambitious direction. A question you cannot answer with the data, time, and access you actually have is not a question, it is an aspiration. Narrowing feels like a retreat and is not: a small question answered convincingly is publishable, and a large question gestured at is not.
Some fields provide scaffolds worth using. PICO — population, intervention, comparison, outcome — is standard in health research and forces each element into the open. Qualitative work often frames “how” and “what” questions rather than causal ones, which is a difference in the kind of answer sought, not a lower standard of precision.
