In the early 2000s, when we were both in graduate school, we were assigned to teach a course on research methodology. The course was required for undergraduate majors in our department. On paper, it was taught by a professor, but in truth, everything was left to us. We had to design the course from scratch, with little guidance on how to do so. The one and only requirement was that each student had to produce a research proposal by the end of the term—a detailed plan of attack that outlined the specific questions the project sought to explore and answer, the sources they would use, and the potential implications and impact of their findings.
The two of us teamed up to map out a semester-long plan through which a student could develop a full-fledged research project in a relatively short span of time. We reflected on our own experiences, both as undergraduates and now as early-career scholars, and synthesized everything into a road map as clear as a twelve-step smoking cessation program. It covered everything, we thought: working with primary sources, taking notes, compiling an annotated bibliography of secondary sources, developing a hypothesis, outlining the structure of a thesis, and summarizing the expected implications of the study.
By following our plan, each student’s paper would come together piece by piece.
Or so we thought.
Something went wrong. As soon as the class started, our plan unraveled. Each week, the two of us met to compare notes, and we noticed a disturbing pattern: despite our “easy-to-follow road map,” our students were stuck, struggling just to get out of the garage, let alone make the cross-country journey we had charted out. How do I build a bibliography when I don’t know what I want to work on? I have general interests, but no questions—how do I ask the right questions? How can my questions have “implications” when I don’t even know what my questions are? I read a source and found it interesting—but how should I come up with a thesis?
Half the semester raced by, and most students had yet to settle on a project idea that excited them. Everyone fell terribly behind. Without a research question, how could they “delve into sources” or “form a hypothesis?” How could they possibly transform their passion into a project if they weren’t sure what their passion was?
Some students chose to settle, selecting a topic that they didn’t feel any particular passion for, and then dutifully working through our program. But it was plain to see that they had chosen their topics simply because they had to choose something. As the deadline approached, anxiety mounted for the students and for us.
The mistake we made is easy to see in hindsight: we forgot that the most challenging part of research is the part before you begin, when you don’t know what questions you want to ask or what problem you want to solve. The research process doesn’t begin after you figure out your core questions. The research process begins before you know what you are researching. This is the fundamental irony of research, an irony that no research guide teaches you how to navigate.
This book is the result of our combined experience—decades of teaching, along with years of reflecting on the discovery we made as we struggled and failed to help a group of highly skilled and motivated students begin their research journeys. What we discovered is this: there are many books out there that explain the “research process” to researchers who already know what their question or problem is, but not one that helps a student figure out what their question or problem is in the first place. Those books do a masterful job of explaining how to outline, draft, revise, cite sources, and more. And they do an effective job of instructing young researchers how to choose the appropriate scale for their research projects. They may keep you on track if you already know your direction. But none of them teach you what to do before you know where you’re going. None of them teach you where to begin.
Why are there so many books on how to do research, yet so few on how to figure out what you are trying to research? This is not hard to explain. The assumption is that the average person already knows what their “passion” is, and just needs to follow it. A passion, we imagine, is something that everyone already has, and is fully aware of.
We have a different take on things. While we do believe that all people have passions, we do not assume that everyone already knows what theirs are. We can have passions we are unable to articulate in words. We can even have passions we are entirely unaware we have—either because we don’t know ourselves all that well, or because we never realized that our particular set of curiosities and concerns “counted” as a passion. Even more confusingly, we sometimes guess incorrectly about where our true passions lie. This happens far more often than we might think. After all, we all live our lives surrounded by external expectations (social, cultural, familial, real, imagined), and it’s hard not to adopt some or all of these expectations as our own. Rather than learning the craft of introspection or self-trust, we opt for a quicker route: we take on the passions that other people have, and pretend as best we can that these passions are ours.
In other words, when faced with the question of where to begin our research, we too often look outside ourselves. We seek external validation. We let others set our agenda. But research begins with the researcher identifying the problem they carry inside them and figuring out what to do with it. This is what we failed to recognize back when we taught our very first class. Without meaning to, we shortchanged our students. With more time for introspection, they’d have had a far more rewarding research experience.
We have reunited nearly twenty years later to make things right. This book is the course we wish we had taught decades ago. We call the guiding principle underpinning this book Self-Centered Research.
In this book, we advocate a “self-centered” approach to research. Focusing on the early stages of the research process, we empower you with a variety of techniques and a mindset that will help you begin your research journey in the right direction—pointed toward a problem that matters deeply to you.
What is Self-Centered Research, and why do it?
Let’s begin by clarifying what the term means—and what it doesn’t.
Self-Centered Research is the following:
Now that we’ve said what Self-Centered Research is, let’s be clear about what it isn’t.
Self-Centered Research does not mean unleashing (or inflating) your ego. Being self-centered is not being self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-congratulatory, self-consumed, self-indulgent, self-involved, self-serving, or self-ish.
Quite the opposite: self-centered researchers are self-reflexive, and always self-critical; honest and probing about their own interests, motivations, and abilities; but also open and confident enough to assess the validity of others’. This means having the wherewithal to challenge received wisdom, including unfounded ideas you are probably carrying around without realizing it.
Self-Centered Research is also not autobiographical. It does not imply that the papers, articles, reports, or books you write will tell the story of your life. Or that every documentary you produce, or painting you paint, will be a self-portrait.
The end goal of the Self-Centered Research process is, just like conventional research processes, one in which the researcher produces empirical, grounded, theoretically informed, and compelling scholarship about some aspect of the world around us, and does so in a way that changes how other people think. In order to identify and solve a problem that truly matters to other people, however, the Self-Centered Research process insists that this problem must matter, first and foremost, to you.
The first precondition of excellent scholarship, in other words, is that the focus of your research must be more than just a passing interest, a “good idea,” or something that was assigned to you by an outside party.
We’ll take you through a process of generating questions—questions that are of concern to you—and show how, through your passion and your labor, they can become questions that are of concern to others.
One of the things that makes research so fantastic is also what makes it so daunting: you could, theoretically, research anything.
Where to begin?
The answer is: Exactly where you are, right now.
Core to this book are two propositions. First, research can be a life-changing experience, if you get a few things right from the start. Second, the most important part of beginning a research project is finding your center. Research is a process not just of solving problems but of finding problems that you—and other people—didn’t know existed. It’s a process of discovery, analysis, and creation that can generate its own momentum and create a virtuous cycle of inspiration. Deep-seated problems only reveal themselves through self-trust, exposure to primary sources, and time. Only you—not anyone else—can tell you what you were meant to research. Answering the question “What to research?” requires a hard look in the mirror.
So if you are the only person who can answer the question “What to research?” why read this book?
A fair question.
We do not pretend to have a secret formula for generating research projects. We cannot tell you what to research. What we can offer are specific techniques designed to accelerate a generative process that will have you asking questions that lead you to discover your underlying research problem, and then make an actual project out of it.
The goal of this book, then, is to help you create the ideal conditions to start a fire in your mind—a “fire that lights itself,” to borrow a phrase that jazz drummer Buddy Rich used to describe genius. But at the same time, it will show you how to maintain balance and clarity in situations of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. And it will teach you ways to tell the difference between unproductive uncertainty—that is, when you’re on the wrong path, and should probably turn back—and productive uncertainty—that is, when it may feel like you’re lost, but where your inner instinct and wisdom are encouraging you to keep on going.
If you’re casting about for your first research topic, we’ll help you get started. If you have lots of good ideas and need no help in generating questions, we’ll help you figure out which ideas and questions to invest your time in. If you already have a well-defined project, we’ll teach you how to deepen and refine your research, uncovering possibilities you didn’t know existed. If you are a veteran researcher or teacher, you will find in this book a philosophy of research and a repertoire of strategies you can share with students and even use to refine your own practice.
This book is designed to be practical, first and foremost, providing specific and tested techniques to help you
This set of skills is in short supply everywhere. While we use the language of the academy—talking about papers, theses, students, classes, and teachers—these skills are fundamental to a variety of fields and professions. The ideas and exercises you’ll read about here have applications in business, journalism, art, design, engineering, community-building, and entrepreneurship. The skills described in this book are fundamental to research, meaning that they will help you no matter your field of inquiry or level of research expertise.
Here are the keys to using this book, no matter what your research background:
Interspersed throughout the book you will find three recurring sections, which offer ways of putting ideas into practice at different stages of the research-inception process:
In each chapter, you will work through practical exercises and games designed to help you achieve a specific set of goals: generating questions, refining questions, discovering the patterns that connect your questions, and identifying the problem that motivates you. We believe that different approaches are effective for different researchers, so we offer a variety of exercises. All of the exercises rely on a core set of principles. These include
We encourage you to read this book from start to finish, but you might also choose to jump around. Research is a recursive and iterative process, not a linear one. Likewise, this book is designed to be reread. Whether or not you tackle everything in sequence on your first pass, the only way to get the benefit of our advice is by completing the exercises, and, as mentioned above, by writing things down.
The point of all this continual writing is to produce what we term “evidence of self,” or “self-evidence.” You can think of self-evidence as clues that will help you figure out the answers to the most important questions that a researcher must answer during this early phase: Why am I concerned with this topic? What is it about this subject that I think holds the key to some larger issue? Why does this primary source jump out at me? Why, out of all possible topics that I could be working on, do I keep coming back to this one? What is my Problem?
Self-evidence is a valuable form of note-taking that we believe many researchers neglect. Perhaps they dismiss it as a form of “me-search” diary-keeping. Subjective, anecdotal information, the thinking goes, might be useful should someone ever produce a “making-of” documentary about your project, but it is not real research. We disagree, and we suspect that researchers who harbor such prejudice could benefit from more introspection.
We advocate making introspection a habitual part of your research method. The pieces of self-evidence you produce during the Self-Centered Research process are cousins to the kind of notes experienced researchers routinely make when they read primary sources, conduct interviews, carry out ethnographic fieldwork, or copy down bibliographic information. We call them self-evidence because, during this early phase of research, these notes will possess a value that goes far beyond the recording of facts, quotes, observations, and other evidence about the world around you. They will provide evidence about you yourself. With these clues you will be able to uncover the hidden questions and problems you carry around inside you. Discover them early in the research process and not only will you save yourself time and frustration, but, more importantly, you will be more likely to arrive at the research project that is right for you.
A list of these follows each “Try This Now” exercise. Most of these mistakes fall into one of three categories:
In guiding other researchers and students through these exercises, we’ve seen how hard it can be to avoid the impulses to protect yourself (that is, to be defensive), and to listen to the voices of imagined authorities, which promote certain lines of inquiry and inhibit others.
These bad habits set up inadvertent roadblocks to introspection. Knowing about commonly made mistakes, we are better equipped to avoid those impulses and to focus on nonjudgmental self-observation. Writing things down during the process is essential because those written records will become the basis for the self-observation that will help your project come together. Don’t try to remember everything. Insight can be fleeting. And, as we’ll remind you again and again, don’t wait till the very end. Write your thoughts down now.
From time to time, you might find it useful to bounce your ideas off a Sounding Board—a teacher, mentor, friend, colleague, or other adviser. We suggest specific ways to prepare for such conversations. A Sounding Board is someone who helps you to gain alternative perspectives on your ideas and writings and to step outside yourself. They help you to become aware of aspects of your ideas that didn’t occur to you at first, or perhaps identify unconscious tendencies in your thinking. A Sounding Board helps you to self-reflect and make better decisions, so we recommend that you make talking to someone you trust a habit early in the research process. Ultimately, the Self-Centered Research process will empower you to become your own Sounding Board.
Every Sounding Board moment comes with an important caveat. Well-meaning suggestions from a teacher, adviser, or other authority figure—suggestions as to what you “could” or “should” work on—can have a major impact on a researcher during the early phases of research. If you feel lost, or uncertain about the value of your nascent ideas, a suggestion from a boss, teacher, or adviser (especially an overbearing one) can feel a lot like a command. Or it may become your fallback, your “Well, I can’t come up with anything better, so I might as well go with that!” A friendly lead might seem like a way to speed things up. What if you skipped all that messy introspection and snapped up the ready-made idea that your trusted adviser has told you is important? Unfortunately, the effect can be inhibitory and counterproductive.
As mentors ourselves, we have seen many students latch onto the first idea we floated by them and, months later, produce a paper that left us unconvinced was one they were really interested in writing. The result is typically suboptimal. The point of research is not to fall back, it’s to move forward—to take a risk and discover or create something original. A mentor can offer advice that saves you from retracing others’ paths to the same conclusion. But when a student comes with an idea for a research project and asks, “Is this what you want?” a true mentor’s response is always the same: “Is this what you want?”
In our experience, if a research question is not one that you’re truly motivated to spend your time answering, you’ll find it a challenge to do a good job, or even to finish. So, even before you meet with your Sounding Board and even before getting too deeply into research sources, follow the steps in the first part of this book to find your center.
The two-part process of starting a research project involves looking first inward and then outward. Part 1 takes you through the inward-focused process of becoming a self-centered researcher. You will reflect on the experiences, interests, priorities, and assumptions you bring with you—and assess how to make best use of them in charting out a research direction. This process goes beyond conventional brainstorming because it requires taking stock of your values. It involves distinguishing between what doesn’t matter to you, what you think matters to you, and what really matters to you.
We believe that you are best off starting this process before you field-test your ideas against the wisdom of the research community. Ideas abound—not all of equal merit—and even at this early stage in your research you’ll want to be judicious in evaluating which of them should influence your project. Authorities also abound (again, not all of equal merit), and they can exert undue influence on the direction of research at this vulnerable stage when you’re not quite sure yet just what you want to do.
Having taken those steps toward becoming a self-centered researcher, you’ll then be ready to test and refine your project ideas in relation to the questions, methodologies, theories, protocols, assumptions, and collective experiences of the research community. Part 2 focuses on this process of extroversion. It helps you to navigate the often bewildering process of coming to terms with the research communities conventionally known as “fields” and “disciplines,” as well as how to identify researchers who may not be in the same field as you but who are interested in similar problems—what we call your Problem Collective. Fields and disciplines tend to be easy to identify by their departments, associations, journals, and degrees. A Problem Collective is less self-evident, and as it is a key concept of this book, it comes first in Part 2.