Turn a Topic into a Question

Don’t force a question on day one. Carol Kuhlthau’s research on how people do research found that a focus usually forms during what she calls formulation, after a stretch of exploring, and that it more often emerges gradually than in a flash. She describes the focus as a guiding idea, something like a hypothesis, that directs the rest of the search. Read broadly until you notice something that puzzles you, then start writing questions. Expect to Feel Lost covers the exploring stage.

Take your narrow topic and write as many questions about it as you can in ten minutes: who, what, when and where, and especially how and why. Don’t stop to answer them. Quantity helps here; the good question is often the eighth one, not the first.

The kind of question decides the kind of evidence you need. One common way to sort them, from William Trochim’s Research Methods Knowledge Base:

• Descriptive: what is happening or what exists. “How did the city’s newspapers report the epidemic?”
• Relational: how two or more things vary together. “Did neighborhoods with more crowded housing record more deaths?”
• Causal: whether one thing affects another. “Did closing schools reduce the spread?”

Trochim notes that each type builds on the one before. You can’t show a relationship between two things you can’t describe, and you can’t show a cause without first showing the relationship. He calls causal studies the most demanding of the three. If you have one term and an archive, a descriptive or relational question may be the one you can actually finish.

Imagine the answer to each question you’ve listed. Cross out any that fail one of these tests:

• Already settled: the answer is in an encyclopedia. That’s a fact to look up, not a question to research.
• Speculative: no evidence could settle it, such as “What would have happened if…?” or “Was it the worst…?”
• A dead end: the evidence might exist, but not anywhere you can reach in the time you have.
• Not yours yet: you can already answer it. If you know the answer, you’re writing an argument, not doing research.

Take the strongest question left and put it into the sentence. I am studying how one city’s newspapers covered the 1918 epidemic because I want to find out how their reporting changed as deaths rose so that readers understand how local news shaped what residents knew in a public health emergency. If you can’t finish the third part, the question may be sound but not yet significant. Keep reading until you can say why it matters, or pick another question.

Your first question is a working question. As you read, it will get narrower, shift, or split in two. That’s normal. Update the sentence each time, and keep the old versions: they show how your thinking moved, which helps when you write the introduction.