Where were you when this event happened?

How did you learn about the event?

What did the leading newspaper editorials say about this event?

TEXTBOOKS

Deeper questions

How to Explore Your Questions

This section will suggest some steps you might take while researching your questions. These may fall into the “next steps” category from the diagram above. They can be used at many places in the research process, and you will often do these steps more than once.

Constantly ask yourself: Why then? Why there? Historical research is constantly asking why certain events happened when and where they did. You should always be asking yourself, “What is the historical context that led to this event or situation? Why did it happen at this time and place?”

Search for primary documents. Historical research consists primarily of constructing arguments based on primary documents. You will want to spend significant time exploring which documents are available that are related to your topic. These documents may include photographs, newspaper or magazine articles, recordings, public records, and so on. As always, consult a librarian if you are unsure where to start.

Read scholarly literature. Reading academic literature is critical for you to identify the questions that have not yet been sufficiently studied, to locate your topic within a particular context, and to ask further questions. If you are uncertain how to find the books and articles you may need, you should ask a librarian for help. If you wish to read about how to use a library, we recommend Thomas Mann’s The Oxford Guide to Library Research.

As you read, look for debates and uncertainties. Don't just passively take the knowledge different authors convey to you. Try to really think about the ideas you read and have a conversation or debate with them. Figuring out what is not yet known about your topic is powerful. This gap in knowledge is a good area from which to generate research questions. Pay special attention to whether certain assumptions underpinning a conclusion should be re-examined, or whether scholars have significant disagreement about a subject.

Talk to professors and fellow students. If you have no clue how to generate a researchable question from academic literature, discuss your ideas with your professors. They can give you suggested readings and potential research directions, as well as fill you in on current debates within the field. Also, don’t forget your fellow students! Some students have started study groups to help formulate ideas for research questions. Students can review each other’s research questions to give comments and criticisms.

Put your research topic in the context of other theories. It is likely that your research topic has already been studied using certain theoretical approaches. (Theories are a way of organizing knowledge and explaining certain phenomena or events in the world.) Therefore, don’t be surprised if you come across a body of literature with similar arguments and theoretical approaches. You are always free to situate your research topic in relation to other theories to help you produce research questions. See our web pages on constructing arguments andpositioning them relative to surrounding scholarly literatures.

Look at the end of review papers for suggestions. Many scholarly books and journal articles pose further research questions at the end of the books or review papers. Pay attention to these questions; they represent the thoughts of an experienced researcher about what still needs to be studied. Take them as guidelines for exploring your own research questions. Of course, you may wish to just absorb them as your research question if they fit your research interests well.

Look for interesting correlations between factors. From the preliminary reading that you do, pay attention to things that may be related. For example, suppose you are interested in how disease affects landscapes. As you do preliminary research, you find that in your landscape the rising rate of AIDS is concurrent with the declining area of crop planting. This initial finding will help you to frame a research question concerning the relationship between AIDS, crop planting, labor, and landscape transformation in the research site.

From: http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/questions.htm

Learning how to ask questions is a useful skill. Look at this EMA blog site

http://fema.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Capturing-the-Questions-We-Ask-Learning-from-History/315547-14692

Story Corps (a good resource for lists of questions)