The Askable Question SOC 3333 · Crime Lab · Midwestern State University

Part 1 asks you for three things, and one of them is much harder than it looks. Picking an offense type takes an afternoon. Finding three peer-reviewed sources takes a session with the library databases. Writing a research question that can actually be answered takes real thought, and it is the one that governs everything else, because Parts 2 through 5 are all answers to it. This page is here for that. Nothing you do here is recorded and nothing is graded.

What a research question is for

A research question is not a topic with a question mark on the end. A topic is a thing you are interested in. A question is a specific claim you do not yet know the truth of, phrased so that evidence could settle it. The difference is what separates a paper that goes somewhere from a paper that circles.

The test, in one sentence. Could two careful researchers, looking at the same body of evidence, agree that your question has been answered? If the answer is no, you do not have a research question yet. You have either a topic, an opinion, or a project that would take a career.

Four things a usable question has

One. It names a specific thing, not a category. Crime is not a subject. Burglary is a subject. Residential burglary in the daytime is a question waiting to happen. Broad categories do have research literatures, and that is not what is wrong with them. The trouble is that a literature on property crime covers a dozen offenses at once, so only a slice of it is ever about yours. Narrow until most of what you find speaks to your question, and then stop. You do not have to reach the narrowest possible thing.

Two. It asks about a relationship, a pattern, or an explanation. Good questions usually take one of a few shapes. What explains X? Who experiences X, and why them? Does Y reduce X? How has X been measured, and what does that measurement miss? Notice that all four can be answered wrongly, which is what makes them answerable at all.

Three. Evidence could change the answer. If no possible finding would make you say the opposite, the question is not empirical. That does not make it a bad question. It makes it a question for a different assignment, because this paper is a review of research findings.

Four. Somebody has already studied it. This is a mini-literature review, so a question with no literature behind it cannot be written. You will find this out fast in the library. If three searches turn up nothing, the question is not wrong, it is just not answerable in this format.

A preliminary question is allowed to be wrong. Part 1 says preliminary, and it means it. Almost every real project changes its question once the researcher reads the literature and discovers that the interesting disagreement is somewhere they did not expect. Changing your question between Part 1 and Part 2 is a sign the reading worked. What you cannot do is keep a question you already know is unanswerable and hope nobody notices.
How this question rules the next four parts. Part 2 defines and measures the thing your question is about. Part 3 gives its patterns. Part 4 explains it with theory. Part 5 puts all of that into one narrative and says what is still unknown. If your question is vague, every one of those parts inherits the vagueness and you will feel it in October. If it is sharp, each part has an obvious job.

Ten questions. Which ones can be answered?

Every one of these came from the same impulse a good paper starts with. Sort each into one of three piles. Some need only a small repair, and the verdict shows you the repair.

You sorted 0 of 10.
The pattern in the misses. The two failure modes here are opposite and equally common. A question that is too broad has no boundary, so no amount of reading finishes it. A question that is not empirical has a boundary but no evidence that could cross it. Both feel productive to write, which is why both survive until the paper is due.

Four moves that turn a topic into a question

Start with something far too broad, which is where everyone starts. Then apply four moves in order. Click each step to see what it does. The example below uses burglary, but the moves work on anything.

Notice what got smaller and what got bigger. The subject narrowed at every step. The paper got more interesting at every step, because a specific question has a specific literature, and a specific literature has disagreements in it you can write about. You do not have to go all the way to move four to have a workable topic. You do have to go far enough that the studies you find are about your offense rather than about crime in general.
Now do it to yours. Write your topic in one line. Apply move one and rewrite. Apply move two and rewrite. Do not skip ahead to a polished sentence, because the whole value is in seeing what each move removes. Bring both versions, the first and the last, to your office hours meeting. The comparison is the most useful thing you can show up with.

Is this the right kind of source?

Peer-reviewed is necessary and it is not sufficient. Two things have to be true. The journal has to be in criminology, criminal justice, or sociology, and social psychology counts when the journal itself is about crime, law, or the legal system. The article itself has to report research. A superb journal in the wrong field is the wrong source, and so is the wrong kind of piece inside the right journal.

How to check, in ninety seconds. Find the article. Note the journal name. Search that name plus the words aims and scope, or go to the publisher page and look for the tab that says About or Aims and Scope. Read the paragraph the editors wrote about what they publish. That paragraph is the journal telling you, in its own words, what it is for. You are looking for crime, offending, victimization, the legal system, or criminal justice to appear in it as the subject rather than as an example.

Seven sources. For each, decide whether it belongs in your Part 1.

You judged 0 of 7.
The question underneath all seven. Ask what the authors did and what they found. A source that reports no study, and reviews no body of studies, is not a research article however good it is and however respectable the journal around it is. That one question sorts the hard cases faster than any checklist.
Two warning signs worth knowing. First, if you cannot find an aims and scope statement at all, or the statement covers every field at once, you are probably looking at a predatory journal that publishes for a fee without real review. Second, a magazine written for practitioners is not a journal, however useful it is. If there is no volume and issue number and no reference list at the end of the article, stop and find something else.

APA, down to the punctuation

The references page is worth points, and it is the easiest place in the whole assignment to collect them, because the rules are fixed and public. Here is a correct journal article reference in APA 7th edition with every element labeled.

Correct Pager, D. (2003). The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology, 108(5), 937–975.
Read it element by element. Last name, comma, initial with a period. Year in parentheses, then a period. Article title in sentence case, meaning only the first word and any proper nouns are capitalized, then a period. Journal name in title case and italics, then a comma. Volume number, also italic, then the issue number in parentheses and not italic, then a comma. Page range with an en dash, then a period. If the article has a DOI, it goes last as a full link in the form https://doi.org/ followed by the number, with no period after it.

Now find what is wrong. Each reference below has exactly one error. Click the element you think is broken.

You found 0 of 5.
The two rules that catch most people. Sentence case on the article title and title case on the journal name feels backward, and it is the single most common error in submitted work. Second, the ampersand is used inside a reference and inside a parenthetical citation, but the word "and" is used when you name the authors in your own sentence. So it is (Guerette & Bowers, 2009), and it is "Guerette and Bowers found that ..."
Use the official guidance rather than a citation generator. Generators get the italics and the capitalization wrong constantly, and the error is yours once you submit it. The Purdue OWL pages linked below are free, they are specific to APA 7th edition, and they have an example of every source type you are likely to need.

The three pages you need

Purdue OWL, APA general format covers margins, spacing, and the layout of the paper itself.

Purdue OWL, in-text citations covers what goes in parentheses inside your sentences.

Purdue OWL, articles in periodicals is the one you will use most, because almost everything you cite in this course is a journal article.

Before you submit Part 1

Work down this list with your draft open. Click a line when it is true, not when you plan for it to be true. Nothing here is recorded.

0 of 13 checked
That is all of it. Part 1 is the smallest piece of the project and the one that determines how hard the other four are. An hour spent on the question now saves several in October.