Research Question (“RQ”) Instructions

Word count target: 850 Words Format: 12-Point Times New Roman; Name, Date, Course Name and Section, and Dr. Babson listed in the upper left-hand corner. Goal: Using the Maxwell text as a guide, create a research question (RQ) about a youth culture that emerges from your conceptual framework about a research problem specific to the youth culture. Keep in mind that your conceptual framework comprises your own ideas and motivations about the research problem, as well as your understanding of the scholarly conversation about it.

Step 1: Name a youth culture you would like to research and describe it (one paragraph of 4-5 sentences).

Step 2: Name an issue about this youth culture that you would like to know more about (3-4 sentences).

Step 3: Name three academic sources, each from either an academic book, academic journal article, or academic reference text, and then describe how each one gives you a sense of what academics are saying about the youth culture, and, as much as possible, the particular research problem about that youth culture that interests you. Ideally, there is a gap in the academic literature, a “missing puzzle piece” so to speak, concerning this research problem that you can “provide” by carrying out your research. Organize as follows: 1) State the main finding(s) of the source, and then 2) describe how the source helps you understand what your project can contribute to “the literature”, to the best of your knowledge—that phrase is very important, because you will only be reading a tiny bit of “the literature”. Format: Write out the reference for each source in APA formatting (see the Purdue OWL site), then underneath, describe along the lines above in about 5-6 sentences per source. (15-18 sentences).

Step 4: Now create a research question (RQ), which is a statement of what you want to know in the form of a question, that provides the “missing puzzle piece”.

Examples of statements of what you want to know:

· You want to know what makes this specific community of youth climate change activists effective in their work.

· You want to know why the members of a Temple University club joined and whether their expectations have been met.

· You want to know how social media use affects participation in a varsity sport at another local university.

• You want to know if participants of a particular youth culture can help you understand why that youth culture is really popular among a specific demographic group.

Now put those into the form of a question, e.g.:

“My research question is, why did ___ club members join and since joining, have their expectations of membership been met?”

“My research question is, how does class identification affect participation in the sneakerhead youth culture?

Further guidelines:

Your RQ is the keystone of your project. It reflects your conceptual framework you draw upon to address a research problem, and it sets you up to use certain methods in certain ways. Settling on an RQ is necessary in order to build your data gathering strategy, and then after collecting the data, analyzing it and drawing conclusions from those analyses. Your RQ may change over time; that’s fine, in qualitative research it should change a bit as you gather more background information and field data.