Monday, 24 September 2012

If you're stuck, try a daisy

I also identify with the difficulty of coming up with a real solid research question. I had to do an undergraduate thesis project in my last year of undergrad, and it took 6 weeks of back and forth with my professor to work something out. I think I had four false starts before I settled on something - it also didn't help that all my sources had to be in French, and there just wasn't enough French research for the first few topics that interested me.

I wish I would have known about the methods Luker described earlier. I think the daisy exercise can be used to work out and refine a research question - not just to help with finding resources once you know your frame. If your daisy topics still seem a little broad or if you can't think of very many 'petals', maybe the topic is still too broad and you don't really have a good frame yet. I did a few daisy exercises yesterday and I think I might have actually worked out a research question for this course. It took me three daisies to get to a question that I thought was narrow enough. It seemed to work for me anyways, so maybe it's worth a shot if you're really stuck.

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