How specific should one be in formulating a question? The primary purposes of formulating the problem in question form are to ensure that the researcher has a good grasp of the variables to be investigated and to aid theexperimenter in designing and carrying out the experiment. If the formulation of the question is pointed enough to serve these purposes, then additional specificity is not needed. To the extent that these purposes are not met,additional specificity and narrowing of the research problem are required.Therefore, the degree of specificity required is dependent on the purpose ofthe problem statement.