Chapter 3--Developing Your Research Question and Proposal

In Chapter 3 we learned how to develop our research questions and proposals. Writing a clear and concise research question will not only guide our research, but it will provide the infrastructure for forming our position in our papers by serving as our guide. The majority of research questions will begin with the a question word such as, what, why, when, where, who or how. Yet, some will ask whether or not something is possible will begin with would or could. When a paper is analyzing whether or not a “particular action, policy procedure or decision” is appropriate, your question will begin with the word should.

There are four steps to take when selecting your research question. The first is to Reflect on your writing situation. Once you have surveyed your topic and decided on what aspect you would like to write about, ask yourself if based on what you have already learned, has your understanding of the your writing situation changed? Next, determined what it is that you would like to learn next. Lastly, how has your preliminary understanding of your topic and issue influenced your research? Step two is to  generate potential research questions. These questions will be generated based on things like, what information is available about an issue, and the history, assumptions, goals, outcomes and policies surrounding an issues. These types of questions will help you to define and evaluate an issue. As well as compare and contrast and analyze an issue. The example of how this can be done on page 44 was interesting and helpful, but also a bit overwhelming. In step three, you will begin crafting questions that reflect your writing situation. This is done by reviewing the questions that were generated by the previous steps and choosing those that particularly interest you, then begin to write these questions using the previously stated question words. Once you have generated a list of potential questions, step four is to select and refine your question by evaluating which one is the most likely to help you fulfill your purpose while holding your readers interests and providing the best possible evidence. 

Once you have your research question, you are set to write your research proposal. A research proposal is how you will reveal what you have already done to research your question as well as what you will do to complete your project. Included in this is a title page, an introduction that identifies your topic issue, and/or research question, review of literature, an explanation of how you will collect information, a project timeline and a working bibliography.

Though this seems like quite a lot of up front work, I can see how this work would make the final paper stronger and more effective.