The preceding questions are all real questions that real students have asked in a research methods class just like the one that you are currently taking. In some cases, these students knew they had a keen interest in a topic before beginning their research methods class. For example, Matt, a Recreation and Leisure Studies major, started off with an interest in a focused topic. He had begun to worry about what he would do with his degree when he graduated, and so he designed a project to learn more about what other RLS majors did and planned to do.

In other cases, students did not start out with a specific interest linked to their academic pursuits, but these students, too, were able to identify research topics worthy of investigation. These students knew, for example, how they enjoyed spending their free time. Perhaps at first these students didn’t realize that they could identify and answer a research question about their hobbies, but they certainly learned that they could once they had done a little brainstorming. For example, Aisha enjoyed reading about and watching movies, so she conducted a project on the relationship between movie reviews and movie success. Sarah, who enjoyed spending time with her pet cat, designed a project to learn more about therapeutic animal–human relationships.

Even students who claimed to have “absolutely no interests whatsoever” usually discovered that they could come up with a research question simply by stepping back, taking a bird’s eye view of their daily lives, and identifying some interesting patterns there. This was the case for Allison, who made some remarkable discoveries about her restaurant job, where she had applied to work as a cook but was hired to work as a waitress. When Allison realized that all the servers at the restaurant were women and all the cooks were men, she began to wonder whether employees had been assigned different roles based on their gender identities. Allison’s epiphany led her to investigate how jobs and workplace stereotypes are gendered. Like Allison, Alejandra also struggled to identify a research topic. Her academic experiences had not inspired any specific research interests, and when asked about hobbies, she claimed to have none. When asked what really annoys her, it occurred to Alejandra that she resented the amount of time her friends spent watch and discussing the reality television show The Bachelorette. This realization led Teresa to her own aha moment: She would investigate who watches reality television and why.

Whether it was thinking about a question they’d had for some time, identifying a question about their own interests and hobbies, or taking a look at patterns in their everyday life, every student in these research methods classes managed two things: to identify a research question that was of interest to them and to foresee what data was needed to help answer that question. In this chapter, we’ll focus on how to identify possible topics for study, how to make your topic appropriate for applied human sciences, how to phrase your interest as a research question, and how to get started once you have identified that question. In later chapters, we’ll learn more about how to actually answer the questions you will have developed by the time you finish this chapter.

Once you have identified where you already are, there are two overarching questions you need to ask yourself: how do you feel about where you already are; and, what do you know about where you already are?

How Do You Feel About Where You Already Are?

Once you have figured out where you already are, your next task is to ask yourself some important questions about the interest you’ve identified. Your answers to these questions will help you decide whether your topic is one that will really work for a research project.

Whether you begin by already having an interest in some topic or you decide you want to study something related to one of your hobbies or your everyday experiences, chances are good that you already have some opinions about your topic. As such, there are a few questions you should ask yourself to determine whether you should try to turn this topic into a research project.

Start by asking yourself how you feel about your topic. Be totally honest, and ask yourself whether you believe your perspective is the only valid one. Perhaps yours isn’t the only perspective, but do you believe it is the wisest one?

The most practical one? How do you feel about other perspectives on this topic? If you feel so strongly that certain findings would upset you or that either you would design a project to get only the answer you believe to be the best one or you might feel compelled to cover up findings that you don’t like, then you need to choose a different topic. For example, one student wanted to find out whether there was any relationship between intelligence and political party affiliation. He was certain from the beginning that the members of his party were without a doubt the most intelligent. His strong opinion was not in and of itself the problem. However, his utter refusal to grant that it was even a possibility that the opposing party’s members were more intelligent than those of his party, led him to decide that the topic was probably too near and dear for him to use it to conduct unbiased research.

Of course, just because you feel strongly about a topic does not mean that you should not study it. Sometimes the best topics to research are those about which you do feel strongly. What better way to stay motivated than to study something that you care about? I recently began a study of recreational user conflict in cottage country, precisely because I live in cottage country and it is an ever-present issue for the local population.

Although I have strong opinions about carrying-capacity, environmental degradation, and the interplay between locals, cottagers, and tourists, I also feel OK about having those ideas challenged. In fact, for me one of the most rewarding things about studying a topic that is relevant to my own life is learning new perspectives that had never occurred to me before collecting data on the topic. I believe that my own perspective is pretty solid, but I can also accept that other people will have perspectives that differ from my own. As well, I am certainly willing to report the variety of perspectives that I discover as I collect data on my topic and reach conclusions perhaps at odds with my initial thoughts. If you feel prepared to accept all findings, even those that may be unflattering to or distinct from your personal perspective, then perhaps you should intentionally study a topic about which you have strong feelings. However, if, after honest reflection, you decide that you cannot accept or share with others findings with which you disagree, then you should study a topic about which you feel less strongly.

What Do You Know About Where You Already Are?

Whether or not you feel strongly about your topic, you will also want to consider what you already know about it. There are many ways we know what we know. Perhaps your mother told you something is so. Perhaps it came to you in a dream. Perhaps you took a class last semester and learned something about your topic there. Or you may have read something about your topic in your local newspaper or a magazine. We discussed the strengths and weaknesses associated with some of these different sources of knowledge earlier, and we’ll talk about other sources of knowledge, such as prior research, a little later on. For now, take some time to think about what you know about your topic from any and all possible sources. Thinking about what you already know will help you identify any biases you may have, and it will help as you begin to frame a question about your topic.

Is It Empirical?

When it comes to research questions, social scientists are best equipped to answer empirical questions—those that can be answered by real experience in the real world—as opposed to ethical questions—questions about which people have moral opinions and that may not be answerable in reference to the real world. While social scientists do study phenomena about which people have moral opinions, our job is to gather social facts about those phenomena, not to judge or determine morality.

Let’s consider a specific example, health care. As you may be aware, different jurisdictions follow different models and pursue different overall aims regarding the funding and distribution of health care. Upon considering the various public, private, and mixed models of health care, one might be inclined to ask, “what is the most morally upstanding way to fund and allocate health care resources?”

Although this is an interesting and important question it is not, this question isn’t empirical. But social scientists study inequality, one might argue, and understanding the most morally upright way of administering health care certainly had something to do with issues of inequality. This may indeed be true, but the problem was not with the topic per se but instead with the framing of the topic. As stated, it is an ethical question and not an empirical one. A related, empirical question may be “what type of system yields the best health-related outcomes” or something more specific like “do 5-year cancer survival rates vary by type of health system?” Although these are considerably smaller in scope, they have the advantage of being answerable through empirical research.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that social scientists cannot study opinions about or social meanings. In fact, social scientists may be among the most qualified to gather empirical facts about people’s moral opinions. We study humans after all, and as you will discover in the following chapters of this text, we are trained to utilize a variety of scientific data-collection techniques to understand patterns of human beliefs and behaviors. Using these techniques, we could find out how many people believe that abortion morally reprehensible, but we could never learn, empirically, whether abortion is, in fact, morally reprehensible.