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| Chapter 2: The Research Process
Chapter 3 considers how to choose among potential topics; here we are concerned with the genesis of potential
topics. While this smacks of the impossible—say, of teaching someone to be creative—it is not. Any process
performed by one person can be described and through description made available to another. And while it
is obviously not the case that following a description will necessarily give the same results as for the original
person, certainly being conscious of the steps involved will allow us at least to approximate that process. It
may not be possible to teach creativity or talent, but it is possible to teach people to stimulate and express the
creativity they already possess.
Questions
All good research starts with a question. How does one see or think of a question? How do questions occur? To
answer this, we need first to examine more closely just what a “question” is. “A matter of discussion or debate,”
“subject to doubt,” “problem,” “matter to be inquired into”—these are the more common dictionary definitions of
the word. Especially pertinent is the notion of problem, not with the pejorative connotation of something wrong,
but in the sense of matter to be inquired into, containing a curiosity, discrepancy, or incongruity. The world is
full of such problems and incongruities, but to see them requires an active, thoughtful, skeptical mindset, and a
good deal of self-trust.
In general the problems have to do with unusual circumstances or matters in some way not typical, not expected,
not fitting smoothly together: an Asian person wearing a Scottish kilt; a street person paying for a pretzel with
a hundred-dollar bill; or, in a more academic context, block after block of houses torn down but no highway
being built; the relatively large number of Cambodians living in Lowell; a play by a dramatist in a style that is
quite different from all of his other works. A subset of such incongruity comprises questions of veracity or truth.
These involve being skeptical or suspending belief about something, not automatically believing something just
because it has been stated, whether in conversation, in print, or on television. For example, we may note that in
today’s speech the Secretary of State contradicted statements she made last week; or, the news item claimed that
alcoholism has a genetic basis, but the Scientific American article emphasized that the data are ambiguous. Life
experiences, such as parenting and pursuing a profession, can raise research-worthy questions just as valid as
those raised in the classroom, the library, and the laboratory. Since it is our conviction that discovering questions
suitable for thesis research requires little more than common sense and conscious awareness of the world, we will
set aside questions of veracity and concentrate on perception of general incongruity. If we can allow ourselves to
be conscious of the component parts of a situation, questions will necessarily follow.
As an extended example, let us consider the sample humanities proposal in the field of English presented in
Appendix 1. Its author, Ms. Kelly, had been reading a group of well-known novels set against the background of
World War I, for a class she was taking. All of the assigned writers were male and had been soldiers, and each of
their works approached the war from a similar perspective—emphasizing many of the same issues. She began
to wonder whether any women had written about the War in the same way.
This wondering or questioning led her to look further. She began to seek information about the genre of
the World War I novel by looking up relevant works of literary criticism. Her initial investigation turned up
a substantial body of pre-1980s scholarship on the subject, which suggested that this was a clearly defined
genre—but defined almost exclusively by the work of male writers, some of whose works she had been reading.
According to critics, most of these novels focus on the horror of war and on the sense of alienation, despair,
and impotence that it engendered in the male protagonists of these works. Moreover, this genre is considered
to be central to the development of Modernist literary expression. Interesting, but Ms. Kelly was no closer to
answering her initial question: did any women write fiction about World War I?
She looked in a literary chronology of English and American authors who lived and wrote during the period of
the War and its aftermath and found a number of women authors listed, some very well known, others less so.
And she shifted the focus of her library search, reasoning that more attention had likely been paid to women
A Guide to the ALM Thesis