Refining Your Research Question by Narrowing
Source: Note-Taking, Phillip Martin
Is it possible for meat to be environmentally-friendly and affordable?
Another way to refine your research question is to narrow your topic by getting rid of vague language and adding limitations to what you are going to address. Let’s take the research question we came up with in the previous section.
This is a pretty good question, but it might still be a little too broad. Let’s look back at the article “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler” from the New York Times. Let’s look at another excerpt.
What can be done? There’s no simple answer. Better waste management, for one. Eliminating subsidies would also help; the United Nations estimates that they account for 31 percent of global farm income. Improved farming practices would help, too. Mark W. Rosegrant, director of environment and production technology at the nonprofit International Food Policy Research Institute, says, “There should be investment in livestock breeding and management, to reduce the footprint needed to produce any given level of meat.”
Then there’s technology. Israel and Korea are among the countries experimenting with using animal waste to generate electricity. Some of the biggest hog operations in the United States are working, with some success, to turn manure into fuel.
Longer term, it no longer seems lunacy to believe in the possibility of “meat without feet"—meat produced in vitro, by growing animal cells in a super-rich nutrient environment before being further manipulated into burgers and steaks.
Another suggestion is a return to grazing beef, a very real alternative as long as you accept the psychologically difficult and politically unpopular notion of eating less of it. That’s because grazing could never produce as many cattle as feedlots do. Still, said Michael Pollan, author of the recent book “In Defense of Food,” “In places where you can’t grow grain, fattening cows on grass is always going to make more sense.”
So how can we narrow our topic by continuing to read this article?
- First, our original topic was inspired by the statement that hamburgers are cheaper than vegetables, so we’ll narrow our research to the production of beef only.
- Second, “environmentally-friendly” is a bit vague. There are two possible ways of growing beef discussed in the article: “meat without feet” and “grazing beef,” meaning letting cattle eat grass in a pasture rather than squeezed into a feedlot to eat grain. While interesting, “meat without feet” seems a little wild and probably expensive, at least initially. That doesn't fit our topic of “environmentally-friendly and affordable.” Let’s narrow this to grass-fed beef.
I really want to find out why hamburger is cheaper than broccoli, but I know that I have to discuss the environment to fit the purpose. By narrowing the focus of my topic, I can now refine my research question to the following:
Can grazing cattle be good for the environment and affordable for the consumer?
This is a good topic that can be used to generate an interesting and manageable thesis statement. As you work through this process, you will realize that there are lots of possibilities for research questions based on your own interests, audiences, and purposes. This question could even be written in several different ways. For instance, I could have written “Can we still have affordable beef and protect the environment?”
Let’s review how we were able to come up with a good research question. In the interactive exercise below, there is a scrambled list of steps that we followed to create our research question. Drag each number from the left column to the column on the right to indicate the correct order of steps in the sequence.