Developing Your Question as you Research 

Continue working on your topic and research question. 

• For each item you identify as a possible topic idea, generate 3 more questions. Conduct some initial research online to determine available sources or narrow your topic into some specific focus within the topic. (Yet another example: if psychology interests you, research areas of psychology to specialize in; say you focus on forensic psychology, and then research further in that specific area, and perhaps focus on what that specialty provides to society, what impact it has on legal proceedings like criminal trials, what is misunderstood about it, or whatever else you come across in your initial exploration).
• If you can’t find a topic you like right away, keep thinking and looking. Don’t go with the first easy idea but think about many possibilities before deciding. You have to live with this topic so make sure you like it enough to work with it for the whole semester.
• Finalize each potential topic by formulating it as a question you will pursue. Use a fully developed sentence to describe it, whether you form it as a question or a statement. If you can’t form a strong, clear sentence or question, you need to go deeper into the topic area to discover what’s most interesting or important to pursue. 

Do some initial research on a topic of interest but that you can’t seem to form a question around. Look a bit deeper to see what you find. Does the topic still seem interesting? What parts of it are most intriguing to you? Repeat that process for all the ideas you have until something feels right. Reflect on your topic so far – what may have inspired you, what do you plan to explore? Why do you think this topic might be interesting to others, or who would benefit from knowing more about this topic? 

Assignment

Try formulating a research question by responding to the following prompts:

1. What were the most interesting questions about your topic that came from your thought process?
2. Which question do you think will provide the best direction to follow in your research exploration?
3. Think about the research question(s) you have now. Will you find information that is too broad or too narrow? You can tailor your research question as you explore the topic, but think ahead to imagine the result of the research you’ll get if you use this question for your exploration – do you think it will get you too much information, or not enough?
4. Follow the example above with your own question(s) to narrow it into a good researchable question.
5. Check the criteria for a good research question — how well does yours match up? 

Exercise

1. Individually, choose at least 3 broad topics and list them on a sheet of paper. You can pick new topics, pull topics from from any previous assignment, or develop an idea from our list below.
2. As a group or with friends, brainstorm initial questions you might ask about those topics. These questions can be as big or as small as you like, but have between 2-5 questions for each of your 3 topics.
3. Take one topic and one of the initial questions – come up with a few areas that might be explored, and/or more questions that occur to you about it.
4. Then, consider each question: How can you make it more focused and specific? How can it become a more focused research question, like the example above?
5. Write one example of a broad topic and the final more-researchable question you come up with.

Some of the more common topic areas include:

• Social media and mental health
• Social media and childhood development
• Climate change
• Fitness/Nutrition
• Eating Disorders
• College life (esp. stressors)
• Medical research (new treatments and technologies)
• The influence of media consumption (violent video games, true crime podcasts, etc.)
• Space travel
• Cybersecurity
• Trauma and PTSD
• Sports and mental health (esp. college sports)
• Sports and childhood development
• Sports injuries (esp. concussions and TBI)
• Pharmaceuticals (biotech advances, uses for fungi in new drugs, etc).