Clarifying Our Research Question

This week’s blog prompt asks students to succinctly explain their topic, research question, and audience as they work on narrowing the scope of their projects.

We’ve had a few discussions as to what “scope” means in terms of research question, method, and data, but first hey need to clarify what it is they are trying to find out and explain to what audience.

The focus sentence that the book suggests is:

I am studying _________because I want to find out what/why/how ________, in order to help my reader understand _________.

This gets to topic, research question, audience, and significance to audience.

They’re also asked to explain whether their research question is conceptual or practical. In other words, is the primary goal of the project to advance knowledge or solve a specific problem for a stakeholder.

My focus sentence is:

I am studying local inclusive stand-up comedy open mics because I want to find out if and how they empower more maginalized voices to try stand-up, in order to help my audience understand how they can create practical inverventions with their own research.

The theme of the conference at which I am presenting this work is all about grounding our research and using it to help the constituencies that we study. While the original project’s aim was to theorize the experiences of women and queer comics breaking into comedy, this smaller piece is about the creating community intervention through that theorization and seeing if it had an impact. This specific conference presentation is taking a conceptual project and applying it to a practical problem. It’s a good example of how every research question has conceptual and practical elements to it, though in the academy we can sometimes get a bit stuck in the conceptual.