From Curiosity to Question

Lecture · Module 5 · Wed Sep 16

Preparing for Project 1

Modules 1 through 5 have given you the pieces of a descriptive-analysis workflow: how to move from a question, to a population, to measured variables, to tables and figures, and finally to a reproducible document that tells a clear data story.

Today, you will begin using that workflow on a topic your team chooses.

By the end of today’s session, your Project 1 team will be formed. You will choose a topic your team cares about, find a Pew Research Center American Trends Panel wave that contains useful variables, and draft a research question that can guide your analysis.

Your question does not need to be perfect today. It just needs to be a strong starting point: descriptive, answerable from the wave, and narrow enough to complete in four weeks.

What today feeds

Project 1 asks your team to post documentation/project-plan.md to your repository. It has ten sections. Today fills in five of them.

Section	Filled today?
Team	✅
Topic	✅
Research question	✅ draft
Intended reader	—
ATP wave	✅ candidate
Focal variables	—
Planned comparison	✅ draft
Survey weight	—
Measurement question	—
Feasibility	—

Everything today happens on paper. Your repository does not exist yet. You will transcribe this into the plan file once it does.

Before you look · what makes an idea interesting?

How to recognize an idea worth describing

Interesting descriptive questions usually begin with one of these sparks:

Spark	What to look for	Example question shape
A surprising number	A statistic that makes you pause	How common is ___ among ___?
A group difference	A pattern that seems to vary by age, gender, education, party, religion, income, or region	How does ___ differ by ___?
A public argument	A claim people make confidently but rarely put numbers behind	What share of ___ believe or report ___?
A population you care about	A group connected to your field, work, or research interests	Among ___, how common is ___?
A mismatch	A gap between what people say, believe, experience, or do	How do ___ and ___ line up?
A measurement question	A concept that sounds simple until you ask how it was measured	How did Pew measure ___, and what does that reveal?

A good Project 1 idea does not need to be dramatic. It needs to be describable — a pattern that could become a table, a figure, and an insightful commentary.

Part 1 · Find something that interests you

In this first part, you are going shopping for an idea. The goal is not to find the perfect project in twenty minutes. The goal is to find a topic that makes you say:

“There is something here worth describing carefully.”

Work alone. Two windows open:

the Pew report library — browse by topic: politics, religion, technology, family, work, immigration, science, news habits
the ATP dataset index — the waves themselves

It’s probably best to start from a report, not from a dataset. Reports are written to be interesting; codebooks are not. When a finding makes you want to know more, find the wave behind it.

Then apply the “I wonder…” test. When a Pew finding catches you, pause and finish one of these sentences:

I wonder how common this is among…
I wonder whether this differs by…
I wonder whether the same pattern appears for…
I wonder how this is measured…
I wonder what the distribution looks like…
I wonder whether people who say ___ also say ___…

Those are the beginnings of descriptive research questions. If you cannot finish any of the six, the finding is interesting to read but is not yet yours to describe.

Write down two or three possibilities

For each possible idea, record:

Topic	The substantive issue, in a phrase
What made it interesting	One sentence — the finding, contrast, or claim that caught you
Possible population	Who the question might be about
Possible comparison	The group difference, category, or pattern you might describe
Wave	Wave number, or the report title if you have not found the wave yet

A topic without a wave attached does not count.

Don’t evaluate everything yet. Don’t worry whether the variables are perfect. We’re just collecting promising ideas.

If nothing is catching your attention

Completely normal. Browsing can feel overwhelming because everything is potentially interesting.

Try one of these routes.

Route 1 · Start from a population

Pick a group you care about, then look for what Pew asked them.

Examples:

young adults
parents
rural residents
immigrants
religiously unaffiliated adults
people with lower trust in institutions
adults who use social media for news

Then ask:

What would be useful to know about this group?

Route 2 · Start from a comparison

Pick a difference that might matter.

Examples:

younger vs. older adults
parents vs. non-parents
Democrats vs. Republicans
college graduates vs. non-college graduates
frequent vs. infrequent social media users
religiously affiliated vs. religiously unaffiliated adults

Then ask:

What attitude, behavior, or experience might differ across these groups?

Route 3 · Start from a public claim

Think of something people say confidently.

Examples:

“Young adults do not trust institutions.”
“People are burned out by the news.”
“Social media makes people more politically divided.”
“Parents are especially worried about technology.”
“People do not trust science anymore.”

Then turn the claim into description:

What proportion of people report this?
Does it differ across groups?
How was the idea measured?

Route 4 · Start from a variable

Open a codebook and skim for variables that make you curious.

Look for words like:

worry
trust
confidence
approval
belonging
discrimination
loneliness
news
social media
religion
family
work
safety
science

A variable that makes you curious can become the center of a question.

Part 2 · Put it on the board

Round-robin

Give us your best topic:

“I’d like to look at ____, because ____. It’s in Wave ____.”

Topics go on the board as they are said. Hopefully clusters will start to appear on their own.

Your job while others are talking: make note of the topics that interest you.

Part 3 · Form teams

Move to your cluster

Stand up and go to the topic on the board that you most want to work on.

Teams of 3. Twelve of us means four teams. The project permits teams of 2 or 3, so if a cluster comes out at two people and everyone is content, that is a real team.

When your team has settled, agree on two things:

One shared topic.
Who writes today’s paper plan. One person keeps it and brings it to the next class.

Part 4 · Draft the question

Now the real work. A topic is not a question. Social media and teens is a topic. It cannot be answered, confirmed, or plotted.

Remember the three tasks

In our first meeting we separated description, prediction, and causal inference, and said the wording of a question gives you a fast first guess but not the answer.

That distinction now has consequences. Project 1 is a description project. It asks what the world looks like, for a named population, on measured variables.

It is not a prediction project and not a causal one. The project also asks you not to report confidence intervals, margins of error, or p-values — that machinery arrives in Modules 6 through 9, and Project 2 is where you use it.

So the question you write today has to be one that description can actually answer.

Descriptive question shapes that work well for Project 1

If your team is stuck, start with one of these shapes.

Shape	Template
Prevalence	Among [population], how common is [attitude, behavior, or experience]?
Group difference	Among [population], how does [outcome] differ by [grouping variable]?
Distribution	Among [population], what does the distribution of [variable] look like?
Co-occurrence	Among [population], how often do [response A] and [response B] appear together?
Profile	Among people who [report X], what else do they report?
Comparison within a topic	Which [concern, source, reason, or response] is most common among [population]?

For Project 1, the strongest questions are usually simple:

Among a named population, how does one measured thing vary across one meaningful comparison?

Team drafting

Step 1 · Write a draft of your research question.

Step 2 · Jot down the following initial elements of your plan.

Team
Topic
Research question
ATP wave
Planned comparison
The thing we are least sure of

What a question looks like after the three checks

Too broad:
How does social media use vary among young adults

This is not ready for Project 1.

“Young adults” needs a clearer population.
There is no planned comparison.

Better:
Among U.S. adults ages 18–29, how does self-reported social media use differ by employment status?

This version is not more impressive. It is more answerable.

It is descriptive.
It names a population.
It names measurable variables.
It has one comparison.
It could become a table, a figure, and a brief commentary.

For this project, that is the goal: not the biggest question, but the clearest one you can answer honestly.

Before we meet again

What your team should accomplish

Set up the repository — the project setup guide walks through it.
Transcribe today’s paper plan into documentation/project-plan.md and fill in the five sections we did not reach.
Confirm your wave has your variables. Open the codebook and find them by name. This is the single highest-value hour your team will spend this week.
Push it. The proposal is submitted by pushing.

Full requirements are on the Project 1 page.

Your question may change. That is not unexpected, and the plan file has a Changes to this plan section precisely because it should. What matters is that it changes deliberately, from a starting point you chose, rather than drifting because you never fixed one.