Question

initiate a discussion on the importance of research gaps. In your discussion please address the following:

Why it is important to search for future research gaps?

Why are all researchers required to provide implications for future research?

How are research gaps developing future knowledge or theoretical insights?

Answer 1

As we know that we base our research on literature reviews. It is important to look for similar studies on the topic of our research in order to provide rationale, as to why are we studying the current topic or researching on it. Therefore, Research gaps helps us understand what topics are needed to be studied or have not yet been studied after a published research on that particular area of topic. Therefore, Research gaps are those areas which needs to be explored or researched and have not yet been covered in a given field or topic that has been researched or studied already. For example, studies on self esteem might show its relation to academic performance. Now here, research gaps would help us understand what are the areas that is missing or yet to be studied in this field, i.e., Self esteem and academic performance or self esteem with attachment in adults.

It also tells us about the importance of doing a research in a given field or specific area or topic, whether the research that we are about to conduct is relevant or not, whether it's required or not. It helps us to see if we are not researching on an area which has already been researched and if so how many times it has been studied. Therefore, it is important to search for future research gaps. Future research gaps tells us about the areas that have not yet been explored and are interesting and useful prospects to study in future in that given area to proceed and improve our understanding of the topic. For example attachment of significant other among adolescents shows there are changes seen in attachment figures among adolescents. Now the future gaps could be how does the change takes place. In this example someone has already done a research that showed that there's a change in attachment figure among adolescents and the unexplored area (future research gap) of this study is to see how do these changes takes place.

Researchers are required to provide implications for future research because it tells us what are the areas that their study does not cover and what areas can be continued to study further. It also tells us the importance of an area which is not covered and provides the pathway for other researchers to conduct their research on.

If we know future research gaps, we would know what areas to work on and what areas have already been covered leading to developing future knowledge and theoretical insight, respectively.