3.4: Research Process
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The Stages of Research
Later on in this chapter we will walk you through the steps of starting a research project. The first steps are choosing and then narrowing a topic, writing research questions, then refining your questions. Then the next steps are searching for articles, reading articles while finding citations, then writing a paper while incorporating those sources. You might imagine that you are expected to complete these steps separately, one at a time, in that order, as shown in Figure 3.4.1.
Many people think that when you complete a research project you must follow those steps in an exact order, but writing is often not so simple. For example, you may not know what topic you want to write about, so you might start with searching and reading articles as your first step.
When Lily got her research paper assignment, she had no idea what to write about. Her professor suggested reading a newspaper like the The New York Times to see if any topics seemed interesting to her. Lily found an article talking about Nikole Hannah-Jones, a famous journalist who was denied tenure at the University of North Carolina. Lily was interested in this topic because she read that Hannah-Jones’ research interests, which focus on the contributions of African Americans and the consequences of slavery, were controversial to the university’s board of trustees. Many believed that Hannah-Jones was being unfairly discriminated against because she was a Black woman. This made Lily curious about the experiences of other professors of color. Maybe she could write a research paper about that?
Research as a Process
If you are doing research correctly, you approach your topic with an open mind and try to find an answer to something you are curious about. This is why the research process doesn’t always follow steps in a certain order. Some people prefer to read and write first, before they do research. Sometimes even if you have a thesis in mind, you might change your original point of view based on new information, or you might revise your topic slightly. Even professional researchers will change their minds midway through a project if they find new information or if they don’t find the specific information they were looking for.
It’s important to do research with an open mind--to explore new ideas and then form opinions based on these new ideas. Research is an iterative process, which means your thinking should always be changing and your topic should continually be refined and improved upon, the more you read, write, and think about it. Research is also a recursive process, which means you might go back and forth multiple times between writing, thinking, reading, and researching. If you think about the word “research,” the prefix “re” means again. Research means to search again.
Figure 3.4.2 below demonstrates the messiness of a research project.
Looking at a research process
Let's look at how Lily's topic changed over time:
Lily was interested in doing more research about the importance of professors of color for community colleges in California. After searching, she wasn’t able to find anything about that topic, so she broadened her topic to include all kinds of colleges in all of the United States. Luckily she hadn’t started writing her essay yet because if she had, she would have had to start all over. She decided to research with an open mind and to not decide on a specific focus before she had done some reading.
Think about the last writing assignment you completed that you were proud of. Draw a picture of your writing process. Does it look more like a straight line or a messy circle? What are some advantages of writing in a messy circle?
Licenses and Attributions
Authored by Jenny Yap, Berkeley City College. License: CC BY NC.