Please review the following guidelines to help you specify the focus your group projects…
First, specify your Research Topic (before class on Monday if possible!):
- Your group’s topic should relate to a practical problem (i.e. poverty, discrimination, the undermining of democracy/citizenship) that must be addressed, as well as your project prompt and the “shaping the future of NYC.”
- It should be stated specifically enough to allow you to master a reasonable amount of information on it in the time you have (in our case, one semester) and should have more than 4-5 words and at least 1 action verb.
Next, translate your topic into a Research Problem, which is defined by what you/we do not know or understand about a practical problem. Finding an answer to the research problem should help solve the practical problem. (You’ll have time to discuss this in class on Monday):
Research Problems have a 2 parts:
- Situation/condition
- Undesirable/harmful consequences caused by that condition; costs you/your readers don’t want to pay
Generally speaking, research problems can have one or both of the following, and your problems should have both:
- Practical Significance: concerned with what should be done, in practice, about a given situation, to prevent or avoid its undesirable consequences/costs.
- Conceptual Significance: concerned with what we need to understand about a given situation, to prevent or avoid the consequences of not understanding, and to help us see the problem and the “shaping of the future of NYC” in a new way.
Tips for finding a good research problem:
- Get input from local experts (i.e. those with lived experience and activists working on the issue)
- Look for problems as you read for class and on your topics- look for contradictions, inconsistencies, incomplete explanations.
- Try to carve out a conceptual question that would help to address the practical problem. What do we need to understand differently or better?
- Don’t just point to the problem- articulate what is at stake, why and for whom it matters.
- Declare your own position/preliminary claims/claims that you’d like to make on your topic, and work backwards to see what kind of problem these relate to.
