Artifact 2: What Makes A Research Question?

Early in the semester, we were given the task of ideating 5-10 research questions, one of which would be the question that the annotated bibliography, investigative field essay, and multigenre persuasive campaign would be based upon. To the right, there are six questions that I had composed, all of which relating to at least one of my interests. When choosing a research topic, it is important to understand if there is already publication on the matter, and beyond that, if there is room for any more discussion on the topic. Furthermore, it is important to choose an open-ended question; “Do people need sleep?” is not a good research question because the answer is simply yes, whereas “What happens to people when they lack sleep” would be a much better option because it can’t be answered with a simple yes or no or even short answer. These two aspects of research questions, along with my own interests, caused me to narrow it down to the first, second, and third research questions on this list. I eventually chose the third question because there was not enough published material on the first topic, and the second topic has had so much research that my voice would not matter.