Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010
Two kinds of research questions
What researchers do and how they think about it
Writing your paper
Research questions come in two varieties. One kind of question concerns what we should do to address a tangible problem. We call such questions practical. Practical questions are common in the professions, business, and government. The other kind of question concerns what we should think. We call such questions conceptual. Conceptual questions are also common in the professions, business, and government, when their answers help us understand what causes a practical problem. But conceptual questions are most common in the academic world. You will need to distinguish the two kinds of research questions because your teachers usually expect you to address conceptual questions rather than practical ones.
1.2.1 Practical Questions: What Should We Do?
The answer to a practical question tells us what to do to change or fix some troublesome or at least improvable situation. You can recognize a practical question by looking at the third step in the TQS formula: that step states both the practical problem and something we should do to change it.
T: I am working on the topic of A, (What's interesting about that?)
Q: because I want to find out B, (So what if you do?)
S: so that I can help others know what to do to fix C.
Suppose, for example, someone asked about your research as an intern in the Dean of Students' office:
T
Q: What are you doing for your internship?
A: As part of our binge-drinking project, I'm researching incoming students' assumptions about how much their colleagues drink.
Q
Q: What do you want to know about that?
A: We know that first-year students assume that college students drink more than they really do, but we don't know whether they develop that false assumption before they arrive on campus or after they begin to hear drinking stories from their upper-class colleagues.
S
Q: So what if you know that?
A: Then our office can know how to give students a more realistic picture in our safe-drinking orientation.
What makes this practical research is that you are interested in the question chiefly because you want to use the answer to decide what to do about a troublesome practical problem, in this case binge drinking by students.
1.2.2 Conceptual Questions: What Should We Think?
Academic researchers ask a different kind of question. Its answer doesn't tell us what to do to change the world, but only how to understand it better: How does the irreverent sitcom The Simpsons reinforce traditional, conservative values? Why do unwed teen mothers keep their babies? When does a cult become a religion?
You can recognize a conceptual question because its significance in the third step concerns not what we do but what we understand:
T: I am working on the topic of A, (What's interesting about that?)
Q: because I want to find out B, (So what if you do?)
S: so that I can help others understand how/why/whether C.
Suppose, for example, that you had to ask your teacher's approval for the topic of your research paper:
T
Q: What are doing for your paper?
A: I want to write on the early years of Motown Records.
Q
Q: What do you want to know about that?
A: I want to find out how and why Motown “smoothed out” African American roots music for white audiences.
S
Q: So what if you know that? What does that tell us?
A: If we can explain how Motown was able to appeal to those audiences, we can better understand how the so-called “mainstream” culture was really a composite of ethnic cultures.
Q: Now that would be interesting.
1.2.3 The Challenge of Answering So What? for Conceptual Questions
Students can be impatient with conceptual questions because they seem irrelevant to the genuinely serious problems in the “real” world. Many can't even imagine an answer to a So what? question like this one: So what if we don't understand why Shakespeare had Lady Macbeth die offstage? (No one asks So what? of a researcher trying to understand how to cure Alzheimer's.) Even if you share that impatience, do not try to build your project around a major practical problem. You can't expect to solve the world's problems in the classroom. For now, keep in mind that you are just getting started in your career as a researcher and that the modest questions you can answer in a few pages are likely to have modest consequences.
You can also look forward to a day when you can answer conceptual questions relevant to the practical problems that beset us. Before we can solve an important practical problem, we almost always have to do conceptual research to understand its causes and effects. We often use the answer to a conceptual question to solve an unanticipated practical problem, as when the Pentagon recently used historical research on the fall of empires to create a plan for the future of the U.S. military.
Try to be patient if at the start of your project you cannot think of any good answers to So what?—even the most experienced researchers sometimes have to find their results before they can say why they are worth knowing. Remember that you'll need some answer by the end, and keep your eye out for larger issues as you do your reading. (We'll show you what to look for in chapter 4.) The more often you imagine others asking So what? and the more often you practice answering it, even if only to your own satisfaction, the more confident you can be that you can succeed at every researcher's toughest task—convincing others that your work is worth their time.