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Framing your �research question

Information sources

Attendance and feedback form:

bit.ly/bric-attendance-feedback-24-25

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Research & Literature

Regardless of what discipline you study or your research methodology the process will always involve reviewing and surveying the existing literature.

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Your research journey

What stage are you at with your research?

Have you identified a topic?

Have you done some searching?

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Knowledge landscape

When embarking on research you need to consider where your research problem sits in the knowledge landscape. To do this you need to have an understanding of the:

Origins and definitions of the topic
Seminal works and key information sources
Standpoints and perspectives
Theories, concepts and ideas
Main problems and questions addressed to date
Knowledge organisation and structure

First thing you need to do when starting to think about planning your research is to think about what information you need. What questions do you need to answer. Hart provides some useful questions in his Literature searching book.

Once you have an idea of the questions you can think about the strategies for searching for the information. For example the origin may just be a case of searching for a dictionary definition using one word (you may then use some of the terminology that you get to as the building blocks for the rest of your research).

Where as when you are trying to find out what the main questions and problems are that have been addressed on the topic to date you will need to create a more complex search to identify information sources to support your arguments.

You will probably be looking for books, chapters, government reports and journal articles.

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Research as inquiry

Research Problem

Access to information, goods and services is increasingly moving online causing a digital divide for those who do have access and those who don’t. There’s a lack of research on the impact of the digital divide on minority groups and their experiences of digital services.

Research questions

What information, goods and services are only available online?

How are people accessing these services eg smartphone, laptop?

What percentage of the population don’t have access to the internet? How is this broken down by demographic groups?

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What’s your research problem?

In pairs, provide a brief overview of your research problem.

Share and ask questions of each others research.

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Contextagon: �situating you research problem

Topic

Demographics

Background

Governance

Organisations

Perspectives

Scope

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Example

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Your turn

Come up with a framework for your topic.

What do you already know about background, key issues, problems, technologies, innovations, historical context and future directions?

Identify the defining concepts and make a note of your key questions.

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Where to search?

You can probably pull a load of information from Google to get an idea about your topic. However, some of our subscription resources will be more reliable.

Have you taken a look at:

The E-resources Guide
The Subject Guides

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Choosing the right sources Skills Guide

ONLINE VERSION: subjectguides.york.ac.uk/skills/contextagon

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People are your best resource!

Academics

Peers

Librarians

Mailing Lists

Social Media

Conferences

Keeping up-to-date Skills Guide

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Over to you

Explore some of the relevant resources to answer the questions that you came up with in the first exercise.

We’re here to help so ask away…

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Search methodology & limits

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Search methodology & limits

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Keeping track of ideas

Useful tools:

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Feedback

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Help

There’s loads of information on searching and whatnot on the Skills Guides so why not check it out.

subjectguides.york.ac.uk/skills