Judy Olson's Ten Questions

Chapter 2 Episode 1

One of the most useful tools I have encountered for framing a research project was the Ten Questions created by Judy Olson and shared with me by Dakuo Wang, and I have used a version of it with almost every project I lead and shared it with every student since I first learned it. It is a set of questions that, for every project you work on, you should be able to confidently answer all of them. If you cannot answer one, that gap tells you exactly what you need to work on next. Moreover, the answers should build on one another in sequence, and if yours do not, your project has a problem with logical coherence that you need to fix before you write a single line of the paper. I am going to share the question list first, then explain each one in detail.

The Ten Questions

1. What is the problem? What are you going to solve?
2. Who cares? Why should people care about this problem?
3. What have other people done about it? Why is that not sufficient?
4. What are you going to do about it? Your approach.
5. What are you really going to do about it? Methods, operationalization, and sample.
6. What do you expect to find? What did you find? Results.
7. What does this mean? Conclusions.
8. Who cares? Implications.
9. Where are you going to publish? What are you going to do next?
10. What are you going to be doing in 5 years?

Walking Through the Chain

The ten questions are more than merely a checklist, since each answer should build on the previous one, and every answer requires evidence.

One note: the answers to each question need to be credible, and the best way to achieve this from a scientific perspective is to ground your answers in evidence, that is, findings and observations from existing research. In this way, your answers to the questions will survive the team discussion and the reviewers’ scrutiny. Which also means that, whenever your advisor asks you to explain “why” about an argument in your motivation, you should never say “Because I think so.”

In this question list, Q1 through Q3 establish the problem, the stakes, and the landscape of prior work. Q4 and Q5 turn the identified gap into a concrete approach and methodology. Q6 and Q7 cover what you found and what it means. Q8 through Q10 position the work, from implications for your stakeholders to the venue you will target, to the trajectory of your career. The subsequent posts in this chapter walk through each group in depth.

I would also view the questions as the fastest diagnostic tool when a project feels stuck, because identifying which question you cannot answer tells you exactly where the work needs to happen next. One practice I recommend is going through all ten questions with your team before any design or development begins, requiring that every answer be supported by evidence and that everyone agrees on each answer before moving to the next. This is the step many teams skip, and they pay for it later.