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Fiat Lux: How Do I Narrow Topics Into Questions?

This is a copy of a guide created by Lindsay Davis while working at UC Merced. She presented this series at SCIL Works 2019.

Using the 5Ws to Develop a Research Questions

This video illustrates how to take a topic and use the 5Ws to create a more focused research question.  Using the 5Ws to Develop a Research Questions (2:57) – New Literacies Alliance

 

Example

Sleep habits

Who: college students

What: academic success

Most scholarly research examines fairly narrow topics and looks at relationships between concepts. For example, sleep habits is a broad topic, but looking at the relationship between sleep habits and academic success might be a more manageable topic.

My new question might be: "How do sleep habits affect the academic success of college students?"

But how did I get there? I did have to do some pre-research to find an angle, but the W/H method helped me brainstorm possibilities to investigate. After some quick searching, I saw that there were articles related to this topic. I had to try it out before committing to this investigation. I can possibly expand my review to include how to combat poor sleep patterns.

The overall research question serves as my guide.