Step 3: Write your focus question (also known as the guiding or overarching question)
Once you understand the topics you are working with, your next step is to create a focus for your deep dive. Having a focus will help you stay on topic. Without a focus, you are more likely to identify sources that are off topic, spend time on things that are not relevant to your work, and even miss the requirements (which can lead to you doing a shallow, messy dive without an answer).
Your focus or guiding question is what you’ll refer to as you begin working deeply on your project. This question could also be called a research question. Your question should be one that does not have many sources with direct answers. There will be sources that answer some of it or help you to come up with ideas to answer your question- but they are not questions we can search for and find articles with answers. If someone has already done the work and definitively answered the question, it really does not need a deep dive.
A good focusing or guiding question has:
- Area 1 topic
- Area 2 topic
- Population
- Starts with a complex word like “how” or “why”
- Requires that you not only read and understand sources but that you think deeply about how to fit sources together to answer your question
- Has many possible answers before you begin looking at each part critically and creatively
Here’s a framework: How does topic verb topic population
In our earlier example, we were interested in happiness, procrastination, and college students. This can now become:
How does procrastination affect happiness in college students at Lehman College?
Notice this question:
- starts with HOW (which is an open question, that allows you to explore the topic)
- includes a main topic (procrastination) that you need to understand before you can move on
- includes a framing verb- in this case affect- which helps direct your attention to what you want to know
- including another main topic (happiness) which you need to understand so you can connect the 2 (happiness and procrastination)
- and finally narrows with a population (in these case college students at Lehman College)
With this question, we can begin looking for sources of information to help us. For example, we might need to read about:
- How procrastination is linked to emotion
- Emotion and college students
- Happiness and college students
- Happiness and completing work
- Happiness and motivation
- Unhappiness and college students
- Unhappiness and completing work
- Unhappiness and motivation
- Procrastination and college students
- Procrastination and happiness
- Procrastination and unhappiness
- Procrastination and motivation
- Procrastination and completing work
…and many more combinations
It is not likely we will find any direct answers to “How does procrastination affect happiness in college students”. Instead, we will find many sources that each contribute a small bit of an answer, and we can then synthesize them together to the answer we want to present.
Another way to approach writing a focusing or guiding question on this topic could be:
What do students at Lehman College need to know about happiness and procrastination?