Part 1 of this book guides you through the process of centering your research questions, of aligning them with the concerns that you carry inside you. These are questions and concerns about life, about the world, even about existence itself. This doesn’t mean that your research will be ethereal and philosophical, or autobiographical. You will not be writing about yourself, but rather from yourself, instead of from external sources. This is a process of self-reflective decision-making that is crucial at the inception stage of a research project.
The goal of this stage is to make sure that you are fully aware of your own motivations and values, are confident of your priorities, and have taken stock of your assets, capabilities, and limitations. Go through these steps, and you’ll emerge with the self-assurance and self-possession a researcher needs to be able to make the most of the multiple voices and agendas out there in the broader research community—a process we detail in part 2.
The basic process goes like this. In chapter 1, we teach you how to transform a vague and grand-sounding topic (whether you came up with it yourself, or someone assigned it to you) into a set of concrete, down-to-earth, yet still preliminary questions. In chapter 2, you will learn how to analyze the questions you created in chapter 1, discovering the patterns that connect some, most, or perhaps all of them. Suddenly, what at first may have appeared to be a random set of questions will start to add up to form a coherent picture. This is the second major milestone you will reach: the identification of your Research Problem, capital R, capital P. In chapter 3, you will learn to take your questions, and your Problem, and turn them into a viable research project rooted in primary sources.
Above all, part 1 shows why a shift in thinking—from relying on polished, externally oriented language to justify one’s instinctual curiosities, to relying on internal, modest, and often inarticulate language—is so important in the early stages of research. Part 1 teaches you how to avoid the ever-present risk of outsmarting yourself.