The Research Process
Seth Graves, Lucas Corcoran, and Kamal Belmihoub
Humans are naturally curious. Curiosity helps children make sense of their environment and their place in it. In this learning process, little kids often torture adults with the incessant drum of “Why? Why? Why?” (Many of you may have been this child yourselves.) And, as adults, too, we continue to derive pleasure and value from discovery and exploration. This is why we go to museums, travel, read books, or go to college. There’s something out there that sparks our interest, and we want to know more about it.
Have you ever been asked to write a research paper? For some students that question might elicit a knee-jerk reaction, calling to mind painful memories of dense articles and obscure citation methods. Students sometimes enter college resenting the experience of having to write what their English teacher labeled as a research paper. But research, in the broadest sense of the word, refers to a process of wanting to know more. And all of us want to know more quite often—we just might not think of every desire to learn as particularly scholarly.
What people call the research process in college writing courses lives closer to home than you might think. Imagine this: It’s Friday night, and you’re thinking about going to see a movie. Naturally, you text a friend for advice. Have they seen anything that’s in theaters right now? What’s good? What’s worth the 15 bucks? Well, as a matter of fact, they tell you, they have—and it was great. Now you want to know: Why did they like it? What was so good about it? In this moment, as you try to get a sense of whether their experience seeing the movie inspires you to go see it yourself, you have participated in the process of inquiry. In other words, you have just conducted some research.
It could be said that routine defines most of life. We get on the subway, order lunch at the deli, and go home and watch Netflix most often without thinking about the things we do. Sometimes, however, something strikes us as out of place: a traffic jam, or an amazing musician playing in the street, for example. These moments can produce in us a sense of wonder at how and why things are the way they are. Most of the time we don’t have the chance to follow up on this wonder. Questions emerge and fade back into the humdrum activities of everyday life. However, a research question as a process of inquiry aims to stick with such wonder and even deepen it.
New Yorkers are all-too familiar with constant delays on the subway. We know that this is happening—and we know that it shouldn’t be happening, and we don’t want it to—but what we may not yet know is why. All of a sudden, an everyday situation can transform into a research question: Why are the trains so late? And, perhaps: What can we do about it? To use rhetorical language, this type of inductive reasoning finds its exigence in everyday life. A problem from everyday life can produce a line of inquiry that leads you towards all sorts of other questions—in this case perhaps regarding government, infrastructure, and democratic politics.
The best research questions often come from everyday life, when something ordinary, however briefly, becomes extraordinary. The goal of research in the humanities in many ways is to make the everyday strange. In other words, we can say that research aims to defamiliarize things and see them from a whole new perspective. But in order to see things differently, we first have to see things in the first place. An inductive approach to forming a research question means, by and large, pausing briefly and looking at the world around us.
Oftentimes, research is needed after we identify a problem we care about. Suppose your parents are employed at a large retail company. A quick search on Google News will show you that there is something going on called the “retail apocalypse,” an accelerated closing of retail sites since 2016. Especially if you are a business student, this might be an interesting issue to investigate, learn, and write about.
Your research produces some important findings: reduced spending among younger generations, long-term impacts of the most recent economic recession, and the disruption of online retailing on brick-and-mortar businesses.
However, upon further investigation you find one aspect of particular interest: that the retail apocalypse is arguably triggered by private equity firms lending money to retailers, making money for themselves and driving retailers out of business, forcing many to lose their jobs. You may find that your academic interests have given you context and knowledge to engage in very personal concerns—and help you find a way to intervene in local and global problems.
Research, in this sense, isn’t so much a collection of facts that prove your case but rather a type of exploration. Researchers are people who have developed a curiosity to go on a trip through brand new ideas and points of view. An inductive approach to research is always an experiment. Instead of finding a pre-existing truth, it looks to test out different ideas and hypotheses that could provide us with fresh ways of understanding the world that immediately surrounds us.