Research Questions Bank

Asking the correct questions is important for African social and development work. Often, questions are copied from outside Africa, which are not relevant to the African situation. Below we provide a list of potential research questions for researchers who are thinking about doing research and getting it published. This list will be updated regularly. These questions can be used by:

• Research students at bachelors, honours, masters and PhD level
• Academic researchers
• Organizations doing research in social work and development
• Research teams, centres and institutes

Questions in social work and development should be grounded in people’s philosophy to make them relevant and they should focus on the people’s problems and issues, not what outsiders or researchers see as the problems and issues. If an outsider define a problem for people, then the questions asked will reflect what the outsider or researcher’s wishes, and there will be bias.

Philosophy Questions

• To be added

Development Questions

• To be added

Environmental Questions

• Developing a framework or model for African environmental or ecological social work?

Spiritual Questions

• Developing a framework or model for African spiritual social work
• Developing a framework or model for medical social work in Africa

Diaspora Questions

• Social work with African families and communities in the diaspora.

Orature Questions

• Converting orature into written literature for social work.

Indigenising Questions

• To be added

Decolonising Questions

• To be added

Fieldwork Questions

• To be added

Political and Policy Questions

• To be added

Pedagogy Questions

• To be added
• To be added

Practice Questions

• To be added

Ethics Questions

• A review of the codes of ethics or codes of conducts of social work in Africa. See codes of ethics available in the ASWNet digital collection here.

Research methods Questions

• To be added