Narrow and refine the topic you chose in Week 1 (Healthcare system paradigm shift; what will it look like in 2025 and where does Robotics fit into?)
To do this, you will identify the conceptual and practical problems regarding your topic and indicate whether your topic is an applied, or real-world problem. This will help you identify the significance (importance) of your topic.
Step 1: From your textbook The Craft of Research, read Chapter 4: From Questions to a Problem
Step 2: Follow the example under 4.2.4 Connecting Research to Practical Consequences to explain your topic while connecting it to a conceptual question, conceptual significance, and practical application. Just like in the example below, yours should have four sections:
1. Topic: I am studying how the nineteenth-century versions of the Alamo story differ.
2. Conceptual Question: because I want to find out how politicians used stories of great events to shape public opinion
3. Conceptual Significance: in order to help readers understand how politicians use popular culture to advance their political goals,
4. Potential Practical Application: so that readers might better protect themselves from unscrupulous politicians.
Here is section 4.2.4 of the book
4.2.4 Connecting Research to Practical Consequences
Some inexperienced researchers are uneasy with pure research because the consequences of a conceptual problem merely not knowing something is so abstract. Since they are not yet part of a community that cares deeply about understanding its part of the of the world, they feel that their findings arent good for much. So they try to cobble a practical cost onto a conceptual question to make it seem more significant:
1. Topic: I am studying differences among nineteenth-century versions of the Alamo story
2. Research Question: because I want to find out how politicians used stories of such events to shape public opinion,
3. Potential Practical Significance: in order to protect ourselves
from unscrupulous politicians.
Most readers would think that the link between steps 2 and 3 is a bit of a stretch.
To formulate a good applied research project, you have to show that the answer to the
indirect question in step 2 plausibly help question in step 3. Ask this question:
(a) If my readers want to achieve the goal of _______{state your objective in step 3},
(b) would they think that they could do it if they found out_________? {state your
question from step 2}
Try that test on this applied astronomy problem:
(a) If my readers want to use data from earthbound telescopes to measure more
accurately the density of electromagnetic radiation,
(b) would they think that they could if they knew how much the atmosphere distorts
measurements?
The answer would seem to be Yes.
Now try the test on the Alamo problem:
(a) If my readers want to protect themselves from unscrupulous politicians,
(b) would they think they could if they knew how nineteenth-century politicians used
stories about the Alamo to shape public opinion?
The answer would probably be No. We may see a connection, but its a stretch.
If you think that the solution to your conceptual problem might apply to a practical
one, formulate your project as a pure research, than add your application as a fourth
step:
1. Topic: I am studying how nineteenth-century versions of the Alamo story
differ
2. Conceptual Question: because I want to find out how politicians used
stories of great events to shape public opinion,
3. Conceptual Significance: in order to help reader understand how
politicians use popular culture to advance their political goals.
NOTE: This is how you are to scaffold down my original research question topic Healthcare system paradigm shift; what will it look like in 2025 and where does Robotics fit into?
