LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Define starting where you are, and describe how it works.
- Identify and describe two overarching questions researchers should ask themselves about where they already are.
The preceding questions are all real questions that real sociology students have asked—and answered—in a research methods class just like the one that you are currently taking. In some cases, these students knew they had a keen interest in a topic before beginning their research methods class. For example, Beth 1 was a sociology and political science double major who wanted to know what her peers really knew about current events. Did they know about national events, such as the results of the most recent presidential election? Did they know about disasters that could affect their plans to enjoy the surf on the west coast of Florida over the summer? Did they know that local papers were reporting rumors of a tuition hike that could change their own ability to pay the rent? Matt, a sociology major, also started off with an interest in a focused topic. He had begun to worry about what he would do with his sociology degree when he graduated, and so he designed a project to learn more about what other sociology majors did and planned to do.
In other cases, students did not start out with a specific interest linked to their academic pursuits, but these students, too, were able to identify research topics worthy of investigation. These students knew, for example, how they enjoyed spending their free time. Perhaps at first these students didn’t realize that they could identify and answer a sociological research question about their hobbies, but they certainly learned that they could once they had done a little brainstorming. For example, Dirk enjoyed reading about and watching movies, so he conducted a project on the relationship between movie reviews and movie success. Sarah, who enjoyed spending time with her pet cat, designed a project to learn more about animal–human relationships.
Even students who claimed to have “absolutely no interests whatsoever” usually discovered that they could come up with a sociological research question simply by stepping back, taking a bird’s eye view of their daily lives, and identifying some interesting patterns there. This was the case for Allison, who made some remarkable discoveries about her restaurant job, where she had applied to work as a cook but was hired to work as a waitress. When Allison realized that all the servers at the restaurant were women and all the cooks were men, she began to wonder whether employees had been assigned different roles based on their gender identities. Allison’s epiphany led her to investigate how jobs and workplace stereotypes are gendered. Like Allison, Teresa also struggled to identify a research topic. Her academic experiences had not inspired any specific research interests, and when asked about hobbies, Teresa claimed to have none. When asked what really annoys her, it occurred to Teresa that she resented the amount of time her friends spent watch and discussing the reality television show The Bachelor. This realization led Teresa to her own aha moment: She would investigate who watches reality television and why.
In each of these cases, students did what sociologists refer to as starting where you are, an idea eloquently described in previous research methods texts by John and Lyn Lofland (1995) 2 and by Kristin Esterberg (2002; MacLeod, 2008). 3 Whether it was thinking about a question they’d had for some time, identifying a question about their own interests and hobbies, or taking a look at patterns in their everyday life, every student in these research methods classes managed both to identify a sociological research question that was of interest to them and to collect data to help answer that question. In this chapter we’ll focus on how to identify possible topics for study, how to make your topic sociological, how to phrase your interest as a research question, and how to get started once you have identified that question. In later chapters, we’ll learn more about how to actually answer the questions you will have developed by the time you finish this chapter.
Once you have identified where you already are, there are two overarching questions you need to ask yourself: how do you feel about where you already are, and what do you know about where you already are?
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