Chapter 5: Asking Research Questions
Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
- Starting research from a place of curiosity—as scholars, or students, or even in our everyday lives—helps us confront preconceived notions and allows us to become more open to following where the research leads us.
- Visualize narrowing a topic like the rings of a tree. You start at the largest ring, with all possible topics, and choose narrower and narrower subsets until you have a specific enough topic to form a research question—the core of your research.
- The process of creating and developing a research question asks you to figure out:
- What you want to find out
- What it’s feasible for you to find out
- How you can find it out
- What kind of claims you’ll be able to make
- Developing a research question is a process: Start with a narrow topic, think of questions, and then revise those questions to be more focused.
- Often, in order to answer our main research question, we need to answer a series of smaller sub-questions.
