ASK AN INTERESTING
QUESTION. The next step in picking a good research topic is to pick an
interesting question to try to answer.
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For my master’s thesis, I rummaged through piles of books
on all things nuclear, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and X-rays. As
I read about the first radiologists (people who use X-rays), I learned that
lots of them were seriously injured by their work. Many of them died as a
consequence of their exposure to X-rays. I started to wonder, Why did these
people continue to work with X-rays even as it became clear that X-rays could
be harmful? I’d found an interesting question.
Maybe you started with one of the questions I mentioned
earlier, such as the impact of no-fault divorce laws on the structure of
American families. In the process of rummaging through books, maybe you’ve
found yourself asking more precise questions. For instance, were married
couples with children more likely, or less likely, to take advantage of such
laws? Or, did the stated reasons for divorces change following adoption of such
laws? If so, why?
You’ve been asking questions all along. Now that you have
a general familiarity with the field, you want to hone in on a more specific
question than the ones you started with. And once you’ve done that, it’s time
to make your most important decision yet. It’s time to select your primary
sources.
Don’t bite off more
than you can chew. Pick a narrow question. A really narrow question.
Circumscribe it to a particular region and a particular time period. No one
ever finds out that their research topic was too small, but people frequently
find that their research topic is too big.
PICK YOUR PRIMARY SOURCES. Your primary sources are the foundation of your paper. Everything
else you do is going to be about these primary sources.
Consider one of my early research papers, The End of the Narodniki. In this paper,
I argued that the Bolsheviks were able to neutralize the Socialist
Revolutionaries by adopting a radical stance in favor of immediate seizure of
gentry land by the peasantry. Once the Bolsheviks had come to power and
endorsed these land seizures, peasants no longer had any reason to rally behind
the Bolsheviks’ opponents. The question I wanted to answer was, Why didn’t the
peasantry rally behind the Socialist Revolutionaries? Since most Russians were
peasants, this would have doomed the Bolsheviks. And since the Socialist
Revolutionaries claimed to represent the peasantry, and the Bolsheviks
subscribed to a Communist doctrine that regarded the peasantry as destined for
obsolescence, it would have been expected that the peasantry would have
rejected the Bolsheviks and embraced the Socialist Revolutionaries. Why didn’t
they?
In order to argue that it was the Bolsheviks’ position on
land seizures that was decisive in neutralizing peasant opposition, I needed
primary sources that demonstrated the positions of the Bolsheviks and the Socialist
Revolutionaries on peasant land seizures. I also needed sources that demonstrated
that the Bolsheviks’ position was more appealing to peasants than the Socialist
Revolutionaries’. I used Lenin’s Two
Tactics of Social Democracy and the Bolsheviks’ Decree on Land to
demonstrate the Bolsheviks’ position on land seizures, and I used Victor
Chernov’s The Great Russian Revolution to
demonstrate the Socialist Revolutionaries’ position. I used the election
results for the Constituent Assembly to make inferences about peasants’ attitudes
toward the two parties. The resultant paper was pretty good and was selected by
the SSU history program to be presented at an undergraduate Phi Alpha Theta
conference in Connecticut.
Pick sources that
you can easily access. For my thesis, my primary sources consisted of
fourteen editions of The American X-ray
Journal, the first radiology journal in the United States. It was a perfect
choice in part because the journal is freely available online through The Internet Archive. I could research my primary sources anytime, anywhere.
Be prepared for
your question to change. Once you start mastering your primary sources, it
may turn out that your question isn’t as interesting as you thought. It might
also turn out that your primary sources don’t answer your question. One
response is to toss your sources and look for new ones. A better bet would be
to ask a new question, one that is
answered by the sources you’ve chosen.
Other Tips
Think small. I’ve
already said it, but the narrower the question you ask, the smaller the number
of sources you’ll need, and the more authoritative your paper will be.
Pick something that
interests you. Professors get bored reading papers on the same topics over
and over again, such as WWII and the American Revolution. That’s their problem,
not yours. Don’t let your professor nag you into a project you aren’t excited
about. If you do, your paper is going to be a lot more stressful to write.
Give yourself lots
of time. Research takes time. Chances are, there are things you’ll have to
sacrifice if you want it to be the best it can be.
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