Sometimes your instructor may give you a very specific topic or research questio
Sometimes your instructor may give you a very specific topic or research question to answer for your project. Other times, you may be allowed to decide what topic you’re researching. Whether you have been assigned a topic or not, developing a simple concept into a well-defined research question is an essential part of the research process. Your research question should inform the structure and contents of your project and everything you cite should be related to your research question in some way. Eventually, your research question will develop into your thesis, which is the central idea on which your project is based.
Turning your topic into a research question
There is no single approach to developing a research question that will work for every person and topic. You may start with a broad topic and think about different smaller topics that fall under it, or you may start by doing background research on your topic to see what questions it leads you to ask yourself. A good research question cannot be answered with a yes or no. Creating a research question is not as simple as taking a topic you are interested in and making it into a question. Your research question should be clear, focused, manageable, and defensible (i.e. able to be supported by evidence). Let’s examine an example of this in more depth.
You are assigned to write a paper about the United States during the prohibition era. As you do some background research into the time period, you find that the illegal consumption of alcohol was prominent, especially among those with money. You come up with the following topic for your research: “illegal activity during prohibition in the United States.” How can we translate this into a clear, focused, manageable, and defensible research question?
Is it clear?
A research question should be stated clearly. Knowing what you want to research will help keep you from getting distracted by ideas that may be interesting, but are only loosely related to your topic. “Illegal activity during prohibition” could refer to a lot of things. Are you interested in mob activity, the prevalence of speakeasies, or another illegal activity at that time? Let’s say you’re specifically interested in the purchase and sale of alcohol. Your research question would be better phrased as: “How did the illegal use of alcohol persist when prohibition was in place?”
Is it focused?
Your new research question is fairly clear, but broad. There are a lot of resources about this topic and you may be overwhelmed with what you find. To make it more focused, you could refine your question by limiting it to a specific place (the American South) or timeframe (from 1920 to 1925). Revising your question for focus, it could read as: “How did the illegal use of alcohol persist in the American South when prohibition was in place?”
Is it manageable?
Perhaps even after narrowing your research topic you still find an overwhelming amount of resources. Or maybe you narrowed your topic too much, an