Topic and Research

Topic And Research Question Template

Topic: Put your interdisciplinary topic here in under 30 words. Use your imagination! INDS students in the past have studied the criminalization of the African American narrative using film studies. They have also proposed research into American-Chinese relationships from a historical perspective, combining history and international relations. Make sure your topic in this section is just a topic, not an argument. A good litmus test to make sure what you write here is a topic is to write it as a phrase, not a full sentence. Here is an example of a good topic: “the effect of increased salt intake on high school reading comprehension scores.” Whatever you choose, make sure it is a topic you care about and that is relevant to you! You are going to be working on it for weeks, and it may turn into something you do research on in the future. If you work hard on this assignment and pick something you care about, the rest of the course will be MUCH easier than it would have been otherwise.

Sample: Put your sample here in under 20 words. Not sure what a sample is? Who or what are you proposing studying? If you are analyzing Moby Dick, then that book is your sample. If you are surveying teachers, the teachers are your sample. If you are analyzing the effects of homework on child creativity, then the children are your sample. Get very specific with your sample. For instance, instead of saying “children” in the salt intake example, you might want to specifically study “high school students, ages 16-17, diagnosed with ADHD who live in rural communities.” The narrower your sample, the more effective it will be.

Independent Variable: Put your independent variable here in under 20 words. What will you do to your sample to study it? In the examples above, the type of analysis I apply to Moby Dick, perhaps from a feminist perspective, would be my independent variable (IV). Or, if I split the teachers I surveyed based on whether they were math or English teachers, then that sorting would be the IV. If you want to do more qualitative/interview based research (only do it if you are already comfortable with it as it is more complicated), your independent variable might be the focused types of questions you plan to ask and the coding process; if you don’t know what those mean, then probably stick to quantitative. Whatever you do, think of the IV as the thing you do to, the way you sort, or the way you analyze your sample. The IV is completely controlled by you. A good example of an IV would be this: “I will ensure one group gets 2.3 grams of salt per day and that the other gets 3.4 grams of salt per day” or you could change things up and say that “one group will have diagnosed ADHD, and one will not.

Dependent Variable: Put your dependent variable (DV) here in 20 words or fewer. Your dependent variable is how you will know if there is a significant result. For instance, if you were doing a feminist analysis of Moby Dick, a dependent variable might be whether you found a power imbalance between male and female characters or not. In the teacher survey example, a dependent variable might be whether the English or the math teachers were more likely to spend more time preparing their courses. Your dependent variable is how you know if there is a result or a significant difference caused by your independent variable. It is your measurement. For example, you could say something like this: “whether one group of students or the other has higher reading comprehension scores on an end-of-year test.”

Hypothesis: In under 50 words, make a prediction about the results of your proposed study using all the parts you’ve brainstormed above. But DO REMEMBER to not propose researching simply by reading what others have written. You have to propose original research, not just suggest we read other studies that have already been done. Your hypothesis might look something like this: “High school students, ages 16-17 with diagnosed ADHD who attend school in rural communities and who get 2.3 grams of salt per day will have higher reading comprehension scores on an end-of-year test than similar students who get 3.4 grams of salt per day.” Notice how the independent variable is an observable thing: the amount of salt. The dependent variable is measurable: test scores. And the sample is narrowed so it does not encompass all people. Also, remember, you are not arguing for your hypothesis. You are stating it and then proposing in the research proposal assignment (Week 7) that it be tested. Remain unbiased and do not draw conclusions here. Just state it as a prediction.

Research Question: Put your research question here in under 50 words. Your research question should be an exact copy of your hypothesis but as a question—keep the same words as much as possible! A research question is a rephrasing of the hypothesis and asks a specific question that can be clearly studied and answered. The question above may be rephrased as this: “Will high school students, ages 16-17 with diagnosed ADHD who attend school in rural communities and who get 2.3 grams of salt per day have higher reading comprehension scores on an end-of-year test than similar students who get 3.4 grams of salt per day?” Or a humanities student has asked this question before: “Did popular feminist ideologies in 1974 and 2017 respectively influence the film scores of the Wonder Woman movies released then?” The sample is the movies, the film scores being different is the dependent variable, and the different feminist ideologies of the times are the independent variables.  In many ways, the research question is just a rephrasing of a hypothesis as a (usually) yes or no question as long as the hypothesis is detailed. There are times when a “how” or “what” question are appropriate such as “What do female medical school graduates attribute retention success to?” That usually leads into a more qualitative question rather than quantitative and is most appropriate when the hypothesis must be very broad because little research has been done on the topic, but these kinds of questions are rare. If you find yourself asking a question that starts with “What are ways that...” or “How can we improve...”, STOP! Questions that openly ask for ways to fix things are not research questions. It is better to pick one way to fix things and then create a hypothesis and research question that could test whether it works or not. Remember that we are not fixers! We are questioners!

Disciplines Incorporated: List academic disciplines you plan to incorporate here without commenting on them—a simple, clear list will suffice. You need at least two and more than three will likely create too much of a research burden for you. Note that Liberty University’s listing of areas of study is not equivalent to a listing of disciplines. Some of the general areas of study are disciplines (aviation, education, government, etc.), but many of the sub-listed prefixes are as well (economics, journalism, English, mathematics, etc.), and some disciplines are not even listed (women’s studies, humanities, art history, military studies, gender studies, etc.). Behavioral sciences, health sciences, and social sciences are overarching categories, and you should be more specific if you want to use one of these. Keep in mind that statistics are often used with other disciplines (psychology, sociology, etc.), so if one of your disciplines already uses stats, do not mention stats. In our example of the rural children with ADHD, we might use health sciences and education as our academic disciplines.

Justification: In 100-150 words, convince your instructor that each discipline you mention will provide a helpful perspective on the topic. Show how your topic is complicated enough that it requires multiple perspectives and that the perspectives you have chosen are the best fits for the issue. 

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