by danah boyd
Last Updated: November 18, 2024
The typical academic researcher is not animated by only one research question. Rather, most researchers are constantly asking themselves a bazillion questions. Thus, the hard part of being a professional researcher is deciding how to prioritize research questions - and then to focus, focus, focus. (Hint: many of us are truly terrible at the focus part and develop all sorts of crazy quirks in our attempts to get our brains to behave.)
Although devising strategies for choosing a new research question is something that all professional researchers must contend with, this advice page is meant for PhD students who are trying to select their first research question. (Of course, some of the tricks work for anyone. And I still journal my RQs.)
There's a lot to say about intentionally building habits (of mind). This is especially true if you believe in the power of reflexively interrogating your own positionality and thinking. For this reason, I strongly encourage graduate students (and, really, anyone) to start journaling their research questions early in their graduate degree.
Put simply, carve out 30 minutes of time in your calendar each week and block it. I recommend Friday mornings, but YMMV. Every week, sit down and spent 15 minutes writing down a potential research question that you'd like to pursue. Don't constrain yourself by method, theory, or topic. Don't even constrain yourself by whether or not getting access to the necessary data is possible or whether you have the right training to pursue that research question. You can give yourself mini-prompts if you want. Here are a few that might help:
The important part with this exercise is write a new RQ every week - and to not look at or build on previous RQs. Start new each time. These should be short and sweet. And seriously, take only 15 minutes each week to write them down, although you can spend lots of time throughout the week noodling on ideas. (And in case you're wondering, the reason that you're blocking 30 minutes on your calendar is because, if you're like me, you'll spend at least 15 minutes distracting yourself or procrastinating along the way.)
Write these for yourself. You don't have to share them with your advisor - or, really, with anyone. Of course, you could share. Maybe sharing would make you more accountable. Maybe doing them as a peer cohort would help spark new ideas. It's really your call.
After a year of doing this, you should have written 52 unique RQs. Now re-read them all. What are the themes and patterns that your brain keeps circle around? What are the methods you keep coming back to? What theories excite you? What are some of the topical themes? Find those patterns - and use those to thoughtfully propose a more doable project.
If you're anything like me, the range and number of research questions just keeps expanding as time goes on. The hard part is choosing which RQs to invest in. When I'm choosing projects as a more senior scholar, I'm thinking about four constraints: 1) it's a novel question that others aren't pursuing; 2) either I have the skills to pursue that question or a collaborator who does; 3) there's a clear interlocutor to enage with if I find something valuable (cuz I prioritize impact); 4) I can find funding to support that work.
PhD students have different constraints to take into consideration. The first important pivot to consider is whether you're intending to go on the academic market or whether you're pursuing a PhD simply to develop skills and credentials for a different sector (like government or industry). If you're in the latter camp, what's most important is a project that shows off your methodological and analytical skills in a manner where your desired employer can see that you'd benefit their broader efforts. For example, if you want to work at the US Census Bureau, choosing a project that shows that you can develop novel methods for working with, analyzing, or evaluating census data is really to your advantage.
If your dream is to become an academic, your first step is to take a deep breath. This masochistic path is filled with countless landmines and so you'll need a maximally oxygenated head. In choosing what RQ to pursue for your PhD, you need to be engaged in a game of strategic gambling. The first act of betting concerns your coursework. You need to identify what skills you are going to need for your research. My general rule is to take as much methodological coursework as possible - and then to pair it with theoretical foundations. The wider variety of theories and methods you have under your belt before starting your independent research, the better off you will be.
Hopefully, you've journaled your way into a bunch of different possible RQ paths. Typically, by the end of Year 2, you need to choose a committee and have a rough sketch of a research plan (which may or may not resemble the RQ you identified on your grad school application). Perhaps funding constrains you, but it's quite possible that it doesn't. What does constrain you (perhaps without you realizing it) is the interlocutor. Your work needs to speak to a hiring committee's interests 3-5 years from now.
Academics don't tend to think of their work as being an act of gambling, but that's precisely what it is. You are choosing where to invest your resources (time, perhaps money) in the hopes that it will pay off in terms of meaningful findings that will help you shine when you're done. Yes, you can take the least-publishable-unit path and hope you'll get there by following in the shadows of someone important who will write you a letter. (From what I gather, that seems to be an approach common in some non-US contexts.) But if you want to land an academic job in the US (the one market I know), you will need a strategic combination of letters, skills, and a desirable topic. And what is desirable in a given job market year is never clear a few years earlier.
I've watched numerous "fads" unfold in areas adjacent to research. Right now, we are in the middle of an AI wave. There was the disinformation wave, the critical race wave, the social media wave, and much more. What's hard to see is that the people who land plum jobs during a hiring season chose a dissertation project that was decidedly uncool when they started it. Some cycles are not as fast as these topical fads. For example, there are methodological waves; in some years, ethnography is in; in other years, it's all about computational methods. There are also theoretical and analytical waves. I'm always fascinated by how the social sciences tend to swing between structure and agency as the center of attention.
As with most acts of gambling, there's a combination of skill and luck at play. In choosing a dissertation topic, you want to hedge your bets. If you apporach your project using multiple methods, you are often better positioned for whatever comes. If you learn how to be in conversation with different academic networks, you're also better off.
Of course, perhaps the most strategic approach you can take is to make the academic network as you go. When I started studying social media, it was decidedly uncool (hard to imagine, I know, but true). I got waves of rejection letters from conferences telling me that my work had no relevance to this, that, or the other because it was so niche. So, as a graduate student, I started scheming up ways to host workshops to gather people who might be interested in this niche topic. Since graduate students aren't taken as seriously as faculty, I conned the amazing Nicole Ellison to collaborate with me on many of these network creation efforts. We decided to co-edit a special issue of a journal to try to make community around a topic we both found interesting. This is an insane (and time-intensive) approach, but it's a lot easier than learning how to see around the corner. YMMV.
Whatever you choose to work on, learn how to spin your project to different disciplines and different audiences early on. One of the greatest lessons I learned from my time at the MIT Media Lab was "demo or die." For as toxic as that term sounds, it's really the practice of being able to talk with whoever walks in the door and being able to connect your research to their interests. Finding a topic with broad appeal is the best way to position yourself to be attractive to multiple potential employers.***
*** I want to add a big caveat to my advice. When I was finishing my PhD, I was regularly told that I was unhireable by most departments. Some folks told me that I had become too interdisciplinary. Friends told me that I had become too famous; either their colleagues were jealous or my visibility made their colleagues nervous that I would be a prima donna. By the time that I graduated, social media wasn't just a tiny phenomenon but a HUGE one. Still, I had hedged my bets to be hirearable beyond academia. And I'm glad that I did.