When you're starting your research, you'll want to think about what topics interest you most and where you want to focus your research. Here are a few potential areas to start:
To help you walk through the process of narrowing and refining your research topic into a research question, follow the set of questions below:
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:
A research question should be stated clearly.
“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. In that case, your research question would be better phrased as: “How did the illegal use of alcohol persist when prohibition was in place?”
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?”
Perhaps even after narrowing your research topic you still find an overwhelming amount of resources. Or maybe you narrowed your topic too much, and you aren’t able to find enough information for your project. Based on what you learn while doing research, you may need to modify your research question or search strategy. You have to find a balance between asking an innovative research question and not overwhelming yourself by making your work too big to conquer within the guidelines of your assignment.
Our example above, “How did the illegal use of alcohol persist in the American South when prohibition was in place?” is good because this example is broad enough that you could find information about it easily, but it’s unlikely that you could find everything about your topic in a single search.
Be willing to change your research question if you can’t find resources that address your topic in a useful way. It could be that your topic is too new to have anything published about it, or it may be a topic that has been disproven by research over time. As you develop a research question, you should always think about whether your question can be supported by evidence.
Our example, “How did the illegal use of alcohol persist in the American South when prohibition was in place?” is a good example of a defensible research question. You can find plenty of sources with relevant, reputable evidence about the economics, politics, and legal aspects of the illegal use of alcohol in this time and region to support your argument.
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