Developing the Question

Whether you call it your "subject", your "question" or your "hypothesis", good research needs to be focused on a well defined goal.   However, it takes some effort to determine what your focus should be.  Reading the literature will give you a familiarity with what's been done and will, hopefully, suggest to you something else that might be done. Good subjects often come from reading a work with which you disagree or which leaves you unsatisfied.

No matter how you come up with the subject of your research, it should meet the following criteria:

            Originality - Your research must be original in the sense that you must not be "re-inventing the wheel". Your work can be original in term of its subject (you can ask a question no -one else has asked) or its approach (you can answer a question in a way no one else has before).

            Cumulativeness- Though your  research should be original, it should also build or improve on the existing research in the field.

             Generality - Your research should have relevance to some class of events that might occur in the future. This is an especially important consideration if your topic is a specific event (e.g. Bosnia). Your research should relate the specific event to a general category of similar events which are likely to occur in the future. (e.g. ethnic conflicts)

              Relevance - Your subject, and/or your approach to it, should be relevant to International Relations.

Developing The Topic:

The first, and often most difficult, step for students is to come up with a general topic. It can take a while for you to get to the point where you can say "I am doing my paper on ________." In getting to this point, your own interests are your primary guide.  You have to be interested in the topic in order to put in the effort that good research requires.

Once you have completed the sentence "I am doing my paper on ...", you still have to develop and refine and focus the topic into a research question that you can successfully research (often with in the time constraints of a course and the limits of data availability). To do this, you first need to know what other people have done in your topic area (cumulation) and what sort of question they have been asking/researching. 

Therefore, you will need to review the existing literature on your topic. Your first stop in this process should be TROY Library's Online Resources. Use JSTOR, EBSCOhost or OCLC First Search to search through databases of scholarly (peer reviewed) journals for research on your topic. You want scholarly journal articles because these will give you the theoretical framework and bibliographic information that you will need to conduct your research. When reviewing the literature you are looking for three things:

• How scholars have defined terms, framed questions, and conducted research;
• What questions scholars have already addressed and how;
• What questions, approaches, and/or cases scholars have not addressed.

This last category is what I derivatively call "Things that make you go hmmm" or "10 Things I Hate About the Literature." The best research questions are motivated by a dissatisfaction with things other people have done or haven't done. When you find yourself saying "He didn't look at this" or "She didn't take into account that", then you are on the threshold of an original research project. Of course, in many cases, authors haven't done something because it is difficult or impossible to do; so not all "Thing That Make You Go Hmmm..." will turn into viable research questions. But then it only takes one.