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INFOLIT LAND
Those Challenging Research Questions
by William Badke
It’s my contention that genuine research is not a rehashing of existing knowledge but an exploration into a problem or issue with a hope that evidence-based conclusions or recommendations will result. I’m not alone; the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy has this threshold concept, “Research as Inquiry,” which states, “Experts see inquiry as a process that focuses on problems or questions in a discipline or between disciplines that are open or unresolved” (ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework).
The related knowledge practices for this concept state that those becoming information literate “formulate questions for research based on information gaps or on reexamination of existing, possibly conflicting, information.” That’s the principle, so why do my students (most of whom are graduate students) struggle so much with developing research questions? A proper research question must be:
- Focused on inquiry rather than on synthesis of what we already know
- Simple and clear
- Singular, rather than either covering several related problems or overly narrowing the focus with unrealistic requirements
- Researchable, not focusing on issues lacking sufficient evidence to resolve
- Unbiased, resisting prejudgment of the outcome
Perhaps a look at these criteria can reveal both why research questions are hard and a way forward.
Focused on Inquiry
Inquiry is a difficult concept for many students in higher education, even beginning graduate students. Teaching thousands of students in credit courses for 40 years makes me a sad expert on the inability of students to move from a mere description of a topic to a problem-based inquiry.
In my teaching, I use this concept to explain the distinction in approaches to research: Information as a goal versus information as a tool. The former is the prevalent notion for many students: “I do research in order to find everything I can about a topic. My sources mostly say the same thing, but professors want sources, so I include them, even though I only need one really good source.”
The latter views information as the foundation, or tool, for attacking a problem. In this case, the sources offer various perspectives on the problem and its solution, enabling discovery of best practices and discounting of less-favorable answers. With this approach to research—true inquiry—students navigate the challenging possibilities and use critical thinking to suggest a resolution. It’s the difference between “What are the current statistics on teenage smoking” and “What is the most effective approach to reducing teenage smoking?” You can look up the first, but you have to wrestle with the second.
Simple and clear
I find that students tend to be vague about what they want to research: “Something on climate change and what we are doing to resolve it.” “Why our society is deteriorating.” “Addressing ADHD.” This reveals the classic situation of living in an information fog (my term).
Research questions must be simple and clear, because it is only when fuzzy edges sharpen that we can conceptualize the problem concretely enough to engage with it. For example, a question like, “Is the current industrial development of climate change remediation a viable alternative to diminished government regulation?” creates a picture in your mind. Governments are deregulating climate initiatives, but industry is moving ahead with solar power, electric vehicles, pollution controls, etc. Does this mean that, even if the government is not on board, industry may well substantially solve climate change? This is genuinely a problem-based idea and fairly easy to conceptualize.
Then why are so many students not living in the realm of simple and clear? The reason is partly that they are still developing their critical thinking skills, but another factor, I believe, is the complexity of our information world, in which multiple approaches to any topic bombard us through digital media. We are so buried in stuff, it is hard to pull out distinct problem questions. Even to determine what the problem is requires a lot of thought.
SINGULAR RESEARCH QUESTIONS
I have always been an advocate of singular research questions rather than a number of quests, each separated by “and.” When you want to investigate this and that and the other, you end up splitting an investigation into several of them. True, many social science and science projects do pose several questions, but these are subsets of an overriding, singular question.
A related problem, however, is that, rather than multiplying goals, students sometimes narrow the focus too much by adding requirements that are unrealistic. Some of our English professors contacted our reference librarians to say that their students were not finding the resources they needed. It turned out the professors had stipulated that student research questions needed to include an initial problem but also place it within a local setting, such as the Philippines. Here was my reply:
There is a principle in database searching (which I call the Three-element Problem) that relating two concepts in a search generally produces enough citations to further the research task. Adding a third (or fourth or fifth) concept takes the number of results down exponentially, and potentially disastrously, to near zero.
English students are beginning their research journey and are eager to conquer the world with their research projects. But they are setting themselves up for failure and frustration when even highly experienced librarians can’t help them find the academic resources they need. The problem is not the limited number of our library resources, but rather the complexity of their research questions, whether it be limitation to a geographical area or addition of some other third, fourth, or fifth concept.
RESEARCHABLE QUESTIONS
Students can be overly creative. If you ask this kind of question (this really happened), “Are people who don’t text less intelligent than people who do?” your research is doomed from the beginning. The first criterion to identify impossible questions is to determine how you would find evidence for an answer. In the case of this texting question, I know of no clear way to identify decent supporting evidence. Even if the answer was, “Yes,” I couldn’t be sure that there were no other variables that were the real drivers of the difference. The notion that anything is researchable if you put in the effort is contradicted by the fact that we lack solutions to multitudes of problems in this world.
A second criterion to identify impossible questions is to ask, “Has anyone found a definitive solution that has silenced most objections?” It’s a fact that the more a problem is beset by many proposed solutions, the more likely it is that you have a wicked issue. This is not to say that someone won’t find an answer. Solutions such as insulin, HIV drugs, gene editing, and so on have resolved wicked issues. But most students will never reach such lofty goals. Reining them in before they try is often an act of mercy unless you can see real hope that they will succeed.
Another impossible question criterion is, “Does this make any difference?” The question “In a fight between a penguin or a lemur, who would win?” (real student question) is cute, but it’s at best a critical thinking exercise. In the case of this one, I let the student go ahead, and he produced a brilliant essay. Did it amount to anything important in the real world? No.
Unbiased, WITHOUT prejudgment of the outcome
If your research is intended to prove you are right, it isn’t really research. It is not an answer to a problem. In fact, it assumes there is no problem other than that some people are too obtuse or unintelligent to see that the problem has already been solved. Persuading hostile readers that they are wrong prejudges the whole thing.
This, sadly, is a symptom of our age. We live in silos and intractable position stances. It seems vitally important to many of us to make every contradiction a hill to die on, so much so, we would rather fossilize than even consider the possibility of a change of mind. When I see a student intending to write sheer (and often angry) dogmatism, I know I am going to have a problem. My colleagues and I have found, in the past few years, a disturbing trend: utter resistance to our attempts to counter one-sided research questions intended to push a singular view and fight perceived enemies.
One of my colleagues struggled with a couple of students in a credit course to the extent that she wondered how to proceed. These students were determined to do the projects they wanted to do despite the fact that their dogmatism had left actual inquiry behind. Eventually, I suggested, reluctantly, that she would have to invoke the “I’m the professor and you are the student tactic,” a direction most of us don’t want to take.
Research questions in a digital age
Research questions are a challenge in our information environment. One of the words I use often in my instruction is “focus.” In the midst of the information fog, training our minds to seize upon the core of an issue and follow it through to a question that encapsulates an approach to the issue is a key educational skill.
This is not an approach that comes naturally. But it is essential. Why? Simply because the ability to get to the root of an issue and state that cogently is the only reasonable path to seeking a solution. Such thinking pulls us out of silos (unless we are merely trying to prove our assumptions) and engages us in something more nuanced. It requires us to engage with other voices, some of them antithetical to what we believe, in order to move us beyond what we know. A good research question sets us up for all of that.
How do we help our students formulate such questions intelligently? That’s a tall order. The best method I have found is to let them try and then to offer suggestions and critiques until they begin to understand what works as a question and what fails. Active mentoring, whether at the reference desk or in a credit information literacy course, succeeds better than anything else I know. |
