1.1 Crafting a Research Question

The process of conducting a research project starts with defining a research question to explore. For many students, this can be daunting. Yale University Sociology’s Handbook for Undergraduate Thesis research usefully breaks down the types of questions sociologists answer into three broad categories. I’ve provided these three categories below along with some sample research questions on undocumented immigration:

• “Questions about the meaning of certain activities, practices, or experiences for particular social groups.”
  • “How do classmates respond when a student discloses that they are an undocumented immigrant?”
  • “How does participation in an immigrant advocacy group effect undocumented immigrants?”
  • “How does disclosing undocumented status change the treatment of immigrants in social services settings?”
• “Questions about the ways that identification with larger social categories – race, ethnicity, religion, political identification, gender – affect aspects of social life.”
  • “What is the relationship between political conservatism and beliefs about immigration?”
  • “How do views of immigration vary based on gender identity?”
  • “What is the relationship between religiosity and support for undocumented immigrants?”
• “Questions about the influence of particular variables on other variables or outcomes, including questions that compare groups and track trends across a broader scale.”
  • “What is the relationship between levels of education and employment for undocumented immigrants?”
  • “How does racial segregation impact the outcomes of undocumented immigrants in cities?”
  • “What is the effect of DREAMer status on educational attainment?”

Each student should think about the overarching category they want to conduct research in. If you are enrolled in SOC 4015, you have the option from picking from some pre-defined topics, so the broad category can be easily extracted from the list of variables found under “Data for SOC 4015”. If you opt to pick your own data instead (or have to, if you are in SOC 5050), you will want to start with a broad category like “illegal immigration” and then narrow down that to something that is narrow enough that you can address it with the data you have. This means that once you have a question, you want to seek out some data to help you address it. This process is covered in the next two sections, split based on whether you are enrolled in SOC 4015 (see “Data for SOC 4015”) or SOC 5050 (see “Data for SOC 5050”). If you are enrolled in SOC 4015 want to pick your own data set, follow the instructions under “Data for SOC 4015.”

Like the research process as a whole (see “Data Analysis is not Linear”), you may find that crafting a research question is an iterative process. You’ll start with a broad topic, make a first attempt at narrowing it down, and then subsequently update the question as you find some related sources (and, if you are in SOC 5050, conduct a full-fledged literature review).