This is the first post in a new mini-series on RQ–RH–D–M across fields. The purpose of the series is to give readers a compact, practical toolkit showing how research questions (RQ), research hypotheses (RH) or working propositions, data (D), and methodology (M) can be aligned in different disciplines and under different research designs.

Education is an ideal field for starting this series because it naturally includes quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research. Researchers in education often work with achievement data, classroom processes, institutional structures, policy change, inclusion, identity, and experience. That makes education especially useful for seeing how the same substantive problem can be framed differently depending on the design and the type of evidence available.