I was doing research for a research article I had to do for English and it was one of the most unique ways I have every researched for a paper.
For starters, I didn’t have a research question, instead I simply had a topic. I knew I wanted to talk about elections and this turned out to be enough to go on. Looking at databases, I found articles about elections, including the use of social media and voter ID laws.
While I couldn’t quite see how these two articles were related, after I did more research, I started making connections.
Source from Giphy
At first, I only focused on millennials and how they participated in elections. As my research continued however I came across many articles about Voter ID laws. Through my research I discovered that Voter ID Laws target people of color, a group that historically have a low turnout to the polls. I then drew a connection: both millennial and people of color often do not go and vote. Drawing from all of my sources and my survey, I began to fill in a connection that is not immediately evident and came up with the potential research question:
What encourages, or discourages, groups of people, who historically have low voter, turnout to go out and vote?