By Karen
Sternheimer

Robin (not her real name) is a student of mine who came to
my office to discuss her research paper for my class, due two weeks from the
day she came to see me. She is very excited about her topic, which she selected
for the assignment. She would like to study how poverty impacts education.

This is a big question, and an important one at that. But it
is too big to explore in any sort of depth, especially within two weeks.
Scholars can spend their entire careers researching questions like these; the
first step to being able to conduct your own research—especially for the first
time and within a tight time frame—is to narrow your focus.

My first suggestion to Robin was to think about how she
would measure both poverty and education. Since she will be using secondary data sources,
in this case data collected by government agencies, she needs to first see what
kinds of information sources like the U.S.
Census Bureau and the National Center for
Education Statistics (NCES)have already collected, and what sort of data
will be useful for her.

Then she needs to be much more specific: what does she want
to find out about education? High school graduation rates? Test scores? Reading
levels? How will poverty be defined: the percent of students receiving free or
subsidized meals at school? The poverty rate by ZIP code? She would need to
make sure her measures are concrete, rather than abstract, or operationalize her
measures.

If she were collecting data herself in the form of a survey
or interview, she would need to refine her question even more. Who would be her
potential participants? How will she find them? Would she conduct a random sample, or (more
likely) a convenience
sample? The answers to these questions would dictate what sort of question
her research would address. In all likelihood, it would be a relatively narrow
question because she would likely only be able to sample a small group that she
has easy access to studying.

I have noticed that many of my undergraduate students like
to ask big questions, and that’s not a bad thing. Sociology is appealing
because it helps us answer the big questions about society; students want to find
big answers too. They rarely start with specific, focused questions for this
and other reasons. A “small” question may seem like it won’t yield enough
information to meet the assigned paper length, so to assure they’ll have ample
material, many students start big—even if it means writing a very superficial
paper.

“Small” questions seem less important, and thus less worthy
of a good grade for some students. This is a common concern they have when I
encourage them to narrow their focus. After they ask for reassurance on whether
they will have enough material to write however much they need to write, they
ask if it isn’t somehow “cheating” to ask a more focused question. “Wouldn’t
that be too easy?” I often hear.  If they
only find out a little about their topic of interest, is that still okay? The
underlying concern: “If my research doesn’t find the answer to solve a major
social issue, will I still get a good grade?”

The secret is that’s what sociologists actually do: research
small bits of a larger issue to find pieces to a larger sociological puzzle.
Doctoral dissertations are often so specific that they are often the butt of
jokes. If you check out ProQuest’s
Dissertation Abstracts International database and look up titles of
dissertations, you will see what I mean. (Or you can ask your TA what their
dissertation research is about and find out first hand).

Asking smaller questions means sacrificing breadth for
depth, and while at first it may seem less satisfying to do that, understanding
a topic in greater depth is ultimately what we are trying to do not just in the
social sciences, but within education as a whole.

The impulse to ask big questions is a good one, as is the
desire for big answers. But the answers arrive in small packages, little by
little. As much as we might wish to find the answers in one study, it takes
many studies—and many researchers—to get big results.