IB World Religions 8.1.2. Choosing a Focus and Writing the Research Question Notes

8.1.2. Choosing a Focus and Writing the Research Question

Territory open to investigation

1. The investigative study examines one aspect of the religious experience, practice or belief of a group and of individual adherents. The unit of study is a particular piece of religious life, never a religion as a whole.
2. Any religion may be the focus. The nine religions of the course set no limit, so a student may work on a local congregation, a new religious movement or an indigenous tradition.
3. The study is an academic exercise. It reports and analyses what adherents hold and do, and it does not set out to defend, promote or discredit the tradition it examines.
4. Practical reach matters as much as interest. A workable aspect is one where the student can actually meet adherents, attend something in person, examine artifacts or gather substantial sources.
5. Studies of a student's own community are permitted and common. Familiarity helps enormously with access, and it also builds in assumptions that the study will later have to examine.
6. Personal interest still counts for a great deal. Twenty hours spent on a question the student finds dull produces thin findings and thinner reflection.
7. The same work cannot serve as both the investigative study and an extended essay. A topic the student intends to use elsewhere should be set aside now rather than reworked later.

Six suggested lines of enquiry

1. An interview study takes one adherent's personal religious experience and the identity or world view it supports. It suits a student with reliable access to someone willing to talk at length.
2. An observation study attends a festival or a rite of passage and asks what it is for and what it means to those present. Vaisakhi, a bar mitzvah or the Eid prayers would each serve.
3. A comparative study sets the worship of two or more groups within one religion beside each other, for instance an Orthodox and a Reform Shabbat service, or a Catholic Mass and a Pentecostal Sunday gathering.
4. An artifact study reads religious narratives out of objects and images. Depictions of the Buddha's enlightenment and a museum's collection of Torah ornaments are typical material.
5. A source-based study takes a contemporary issue or dilemma, such as inter-religious marriage or conversion, and works through media coverage, internet material and secondary literature.
6. An interpretive study compares radical, liberal, conservative and fundamentalist readings inside one tradition, using interviews, observation and research together.
7. The six overlap in practice. A study of Divali at one temple may well combine observation, interviews and reading, and nothing requires a student to pick only one.

From topic to question

1. A topic names a subject, while a research question commits the study to something it can answer. Making that move is the single most useful piece of planning a student does.
2. The guide's own examples show the pattern. One asks after the significance of Ramadan for a particular Muslim family, and another after the importance of believer's baptism to a Baptist congregation.
3. Others tie practice to belief directly, asking what the differences between Orthodox and Reform observance of Shabbat signify and how those differences connect to what each group believes.
4. Two further examples widen the range. One asks how an indigenous religion responds to its environment, and another how beliefs are transmitted through art and architecture.
5. That last one has well-worn instances: depictions of the Buddha's enlightenment, the design of a gurdwara, portraits of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the stained glass of a synagogue set beside that of a church.
6. Each of these names a group, names an aspect and asks something findings could actually settle. A question that fails any of the three makes the rest of the study hard to write.
7. Word the question so that it invites explanation rather than a fact. Asking what a practice means to a group, or how belief and practice connect, leaves room for the analysis that follows.

Scope, access and time

1. Scope is the boundary drawn around the question: which people, which place, which period, and what the study will deliberately leave out.
2. Narrow scope is an advantage rather than a limitation. A study of one family's Ramadan can be detailed and evidenced, while a study of Ramadan in general can only be general.
3. Twenty hours of course time and 1,800 words set real limits. A question needing five interviews and three site visits is usually a question that needs cutting down.
4. Access decides feasibility. Before fixing the question a student should know who has agreed to be interviewed, what will be attended, and when it happens.
5. Festivals and rites of passage sit at fixed points in the calendar. A question about Divali or a bar mitzvah has to be planned around a date nobody can move.
6. The question and the plan have to fit each other. If the plan cannot generate evidence bearing on the question, one of the two is wrong and has to change.
7. Teachers approve topics before work begins. That approval is the point at which an unworkable question is normally caught and reshaped.

Tests of a workable question

1. A finished research question should survive a short set of checks. Running them takes minutes, while repairing a bad question after fieldwork costs weeks.
2. Ask first whether it names a specific group. How Sikhs understand sewa is a survey, whereas what sewa means to the volunteers in one gurdwara's langar is a study.
3. Ask next what evidence would count as an answer. If no observation, interview or source could settle it, the question is not one this study can take.
4. Ask whether the answer is already obvious. A question answered in advance leaves nothing for the findings or the later reflection to do.
5. Ask whether it can be answered fairly. Questions requiring a student to judge a group's sincerity or authenticity cannot be handled without breaking the balance the study demands.
6. Ask whether it fits the word count. If an honest answer would need three chapters, what has been written is still a topic rather than a question.
7. Write the question at the top of every working document. Everything the study contains will be judged by how closely it bears on that one sentence.