Finding Problems: Before Gathering and Analyzing Data

Abstract

Finding a research problem is the first and most consequential choice a researcher can make, but making this choice about what is not yet known can leave the researcher in a hazy world of uncertainty until the project takes shape. While each person needs to find their own path through the haze, I have found that four kinds of questions help me locate and design a useful research project: what is in front of me; how I add up what I and others have learned previously; how the project fits in various perspectives in and outside the field of writing studies; and how the study advances knowledge and/or aids with practical problems. Only when the answers to these four different questions come together, am I confident of the value of a particular study. Often it takes, however, some kind of unexpected catalyst to bring the project into focus.

Introduction

Deciding what to study may be the researcher’s most important decision, potentially leading to unexpected discoveries. Unfortunately, the path to that decision is seldom algorithmic, situated as it is in each individual’s dispositions, interests, life path, and opportunities. Once you know what you are looking for and where to look, you can make reasoned choices about what to collect and how to collect it, but until then you may be filled with uncertainties about what direction to take. Here I offer some reflections about how I have found what to study.

The standard advice for finding problems is to seek gaps in the literature or identify an important social problem. Such problems may be tactically useful in final presentations to show the value of what you have found (see, e.g., Swales, 1981), but they may give little guidance when you are starting out with little sense of what you are looking for, how to go about looking, and, even less, of what you will find. ¹ Attempting to spot gaps in the literature can waste time and energy on wild goose chases for which you may have no special insights or resources. Addressing social problems before collecting evidence, moreover, can tempt grandiosity and easy answers that others would have implemented if they had worked. Sometimes, as well, what we study is determined by institutional demands for accountability or institutional criteria for support, but that institutional research only guarantees findings will be of local, institutional use.

If, however, we seek something of more general or fundamental value, intentional reflective choice-making can increase the odds of finding a research site and research methods that will be meaningful and consequential. The value of each of the methodological innovations presented in the articles of this special issue is in the novel way of seeing the world made available for all of us, opening possibilities for public knowledge. But each of the now-public methods in this special issue has a personal pre-history that led each author to the fresh ways of looking they needed to pursue the problem that motivated them. Each author must have had experiences, commitments, hybrid learning, questions, puzzles, or struggles that opened their eyes to something they needed to see with greater clarity.

Some articles give hints of personal pre-histories about working with people, groups, or technologies not adequately characterized by existing research methods. Sometimes the pre-histories are more obscure. The articles, nonetheless, appropriately focus on the methods described and argued for, rather than the personal paths of inquiry that led to them. Yet, the choice of method only makes sense in relation to the problem space the researcher enters. This article is centrally about the pre-history of problem identification as I experienced it, leading to the choices and innovations of method I pursued over my half-century trying to understand writing.

How do we even sense what we want to see when we don’t quite know what we are looking for? And then where and how do we go look for it? I have found an iterative approach of pursuing hunches and hints can lead to surprisingly informative sites for discovery and methods of investigating those sites. No matter the immediate results of choices, understanding why I made those choices increased the odds of eventually finding something interesting. With reflection on each project, my capacity for reflective choice-making grew for further projects.

Even developing a cumulative perspective about writing over many projects, however, does not guarantee knowing how to proceed in approaching any particular issue. This is now the dilemma I find myself in, even after a half-century investigating writing. Climate change appears to me to be such a pressing social problem I feel compelled to apply my sense of how writing works to make things happen socially, yet the more I look into the complex issue, the less certain I am about what to investigate, as I will discuss toward the end of this essay.

The Dilemma

Pursuing research creates a dilemma. On one hand, designing methods to collect and analyze data requires a research question and a research site, investigated through some method. Yet it is often not clear what questions to ask, what site or materials to examine, or what methods to pursue. Where do you look and how do you look if you don’t yet know what you are looking for?

I have found the process of finding significant researchable projects enabled by accepting uncertainty. Wandering in the haze, I sense possible shapes to lead me forward. But often the wispy shapes dissolve, or issues turn out to be too inchoate, big, and complex to give shape to. I then need to step back and wait for another potential shape to appear. It is hard not to be hemmed in by prior assumptions, to see much beyond what I currently think I know. Yet there is a great world to be discovered.

Over decades of research, I have learned to keep four kinds of questions in mind until they coalesce. As ill-formed, contingent answers to these come together, they have led me to new aspects of writing to study and the strategic places where they can be studied. These questions (influenced by Merton, 1987) range from what appears in the immediate here and now through awareness of what others have found and their perspectives, to thinking about what contributes to the future of the field. Each of these questions may lead me to a research space, but no one alone tells me enough to focus the research problem, locate a research site, and choose a method. I only become confident in what I am researching when the answers to all four kinds of questions align–though that often does not happen as soon or as often as I might like. And it often happens at moments I do not expect.

These questions also guide me as I explore with younger researchers where they may take their research. I pursue these questions, however, only as they seem productive in discussing each individual’s trajectory. Even when any question is productive, the discussion goes down individualized paths, following each person’s experience, thinking, approach, and opportunities.

What Is in Front of Me, and How May I Be Missing an Important Dimension of It?

The first question asks about the things I experience and work with every day. Answering this is temptingly obvious for a practical field such as the teaching of writing, where we spend much of our day in the classroom, working with students, reading their writing, or planning and building programs. Of course, all of us who teach writing would want to make wiser choices, based on evidence. In writing studies, using readily gathered, near-at-hand data suggests classroom- and program-based studies drawing on classroom materials, curricula, student writing, observations, teacher and student reports, interviews, surveys, observations, and convenient local archives (for the dominance of this kind of research in writing studies see Gallagher, Wang, Modaff, Liu, & Xu, 2023; Gallagher, Wang, Modaff, Liu, Xu, & Beveridge, 2023; Miller, 2022). Research sites may extend one step beyond classrooms and programs, such as into particular resources or identities students bring or into professions students may be entering.

These all are important areas for study about which research has revealed much and has more to discover. However, examining writing only through the lens of classrooms and other institutional arrangements, makes it hard to get beyond the assumptions built into the immediate situation. To understand what is happening in the classroom, it is useful to understand how those institutional arrangements came to be and what their implications are. It is also useful to know why people write, what happens when people write, how writers develop, what teaching and other forms of writing support can contribute to writers’ development, and how those supports can be best provided. Beneath these are questions of what kind of beings people are that they write, how writing emerged and evolved, what assumptions and choices are already built into our writing practices, how writing practices are embedded in social arrangements and motives, what force and function writing has in societies, and how writing changes with and even creates change in social arrangements.

At the beginning of my career, I was entirely caught up in the assumptions that framed our classrooms. I at first resisted the idea that I didn’t know what writing was. After all, I succeeded at the writing tasks my schooling had set before me. I thought the only challenge was to communicate to students what I thought they needed. Only gradually through reading colleagues in writing studies and experimenting with practice could I start to develop a more accurate and comprehensive view of writing, a project that is still ongoing for me and the field.

The more I researched writing, the more I questioned the way in which I characterized what was in front of me. I felt the need to study the history of ideologies about writing and to represent data in ways less caught up in current beliefs and practices. In writing studies, our work both gains from and is haunted by self-fulfilling prophecy. In our teaching, we lead students down the paths of development we are familiar with, helping them implicitly draw on the creativity of human history that has brought us to our current situation. At the same time, we collect evidence from those socially invented realities we inhabit, using the terms that foster those realities. The forms of writing we have created are marvelous, but are not naturally inevitable nor the only ones possible, nor even those that may most help our students as they move into rapidly changing futures. Students will tend to learn what teachers teach and value, and we then study what students have learned. An awareness of this difficulty led me to examine such things as educational structures and assessments (Bazerman, 2003), comparative field practices (Bazerman, 1981), regulatory documents (Bazerman, 1987), and historical alternatives (Bazerman, 1993a). This awareness also helped me to value the perspectives of international colleagues who grew up and taught in different educational systems.

How Am I Adding Up All That I and Others Have Found and What We Need to Find Next?

The second question directs me to my understanding at the moment: what the research means to me, what I want to know or am not confident of, what aspect of writing I think is being overlooked. Such questions can mean digging further down into things I thought I knew, looking at things and places I had previously not thought to look at, perceiving larger landscapes to place writing within, or locating relationships among elements I was aware of but never connected. As I came to question the assumptions about writing I entered the field with, I started to make fresh sense of how I had come to write, how my students were developing as writers, and what research was revealing about writers in other places and times.

One recurring clue that I needed to look further was feeling irritation or impatience as I read or heard something. This unease signaled to me that some formulation felt in some way inadequate, that I was rubbing up against boundaries of the limited knowledge of the field and myself. These rough points pushed me further. I sought evidence about what seemed misguided or oversimplified. One study led to another.

Early in my career, in the early 1970s, I found my colleagues adopting many kinds of approaches to teaching required writing courses, ranging from literary criticism to psychotherapy, from personal narrative to standup comedy, from metaphor to syntactical elegance. Each did in fact draw students into one of the many remarkable, inventive affordances of writing. The department I was in, however, offered no programmatic coherence to suggest core values of our writing instruction. I wondered why we even had required courses, even though the courses provided us students to teach, created the warrant for our jobs, and provided the economic base for the English Department. The testimony of students and statements of colleagues from other departments revealed that the institutional requirement for writing courses was to prepare students for success in college, particularly in the majors students pursued. This mandate came from outside the English Department and was often resisted within.

The next question followed immediately: what writing was done by students in courses across campus. That led me to a pair of inhouse surveys never published, though reported in regional conferences (Bazerman, 1978a, 1978b), about the kinds and numbers of writing assignments given across the university, along with support, feedback, and grading practices. These surveys revealed that students actually had a substantial number of writing assignments in most departments. Where writing was not assigned was often the result of previous disappointment in student results rather than a lack of instructor desire to assign writing. Further, the writing actually assigned was almost always related to assigned readings, whether in the form of summary, synthesis, critique, or argument. The tasks and expectations, however, were rarely explained to students, as teachers typically only offered broad descriptions like “term papers.”

On the basis of these results, I started to focus my teaching on engaging students with their academic reading—representing it, critiquing it, synthesizing it, and making arguments from it. I assigned smaller tasks with more precisely described expectations. I also provided students with questioning techniques to find out exactly what the teachers were asking for. Through this kind of practical work, the reports given me by students, and the evidence of my classroom, I started to identify challenges that students needed to overcome. As I talked with students and examined the assignments they were given, I learned how their writing assignments were embedded within their subjects and disciplinary literatures, with the disciplinary connection being more direct the more advanced the course was. This led to my research program looking at what kind of writing was being done in the disciplines. Academic journals showed me that disciplines varied greatly in the kinds of texts they produced, and that the kinds of writing evolved over time, often in just a few decades (Bazerman, 1988). So now I was doing historical research on genres in disciplines, with a focus on sciences. As I changed my vision of writing, my classroom practices changed and I perceived the work of my students differently.

But this approach to research has dangers too. Demonstrating the wisdom of one’s particular teaching, programs, or practices can lead to preaching to the choir—not reaching those who see things differently, have different experiences, and are familiar with different kinds of ideas and evidence that lead them in different directions. Trying to understand and speak to those of different views opened my mind to what they knew, making sense of things they have seen, and evidence they have gathered, even if I translated their findings back into terms that made sense to me. Translating what they saw and thought back into my own conceptual language also increased my ability to translate into theirs. So this led me to the next question that helped direct my research.

How Does What I Am Investigating Fit With Other Perspectives Inside and Outside My Field?

Adopting new perspectives engaged me in what others of different perspectives knew. As I started to see how course assignments were embedded within the literatures, interactions, and perspectives of each field, a colleague told me about the sociology of science, that helped me see disciplines as modes of human organization, relations, epistemologies, and ontologies. Disciplines were not just collections of texts but socially organized activities with particular kinds of participants, interests, ideologies, values, and cultures—living within regulations and expectations. Sociology of science, in turn, brought me in touch with all of science studies, reframing my understanding and investigations of writing. History became particularly important as I began to see writing as part of changing social, institutional, and epistemic arrangements. I came to see writing as infrastructural to knowledge societies and as enabling people to participate in literate roles. I expanded from the historical comparison of texts to histories of publication arrangements, examinations of the ideologies and intentions of editors, interventions of individuals to establish new forms of argumentation, and the situations and motivations that led to writers’ innovations.

Previously, psychological process research helped me see writing as produced by writers, solving problems and making motivated choices. Yet I was troubled by process research treating writing processes as similar across all settings. Science studies gave me a way of seeing process as situated within differently organized settings at different communicative moments. An awareness of situatedness led me to reexamine process in vivo. This was an example of moving the research concerns and questions of one domain (in this case, psychological process studies) into contexts made visible by other domains (in this case, social and historical studies of science). Research drawing on multiple methods emerged at the intersection of domains, such as draft studies embedded with historical disciplinary contexts (e.g., Bazerman 1984), and ethnographic interview and observation while engaged in literacy activities (Bazerman, 1985). The intersection of perspectives led me to reconsider areas that I and others had treated as subtopics within writing studies, of interest only to those teaching special forms, such as business and technical writing. Rather than considering them marginal special cases, these kinds of writing now seemed to me emblematic of other writing, only under highly salient sets of conditions and institutional arrangements. Research questions and opportunities abounded as these conditions could be studied as particular sites of writing and these particular sites could be seen through the expanding lenses of writing studies. I was far from the only one who was coming to understand these intersections and exploring the research opportunities (e.g., Prior, 1998; Russell, 1997; Yates, 1989).

Long-standing perspectives in writing studies that I had initially distanced myself from also started to become more meaningful as I came to appreciate how writing existed simultaneously within multiple dimensions. For example, I started to see contestatory rhetoric (rather than as an overgeneralized techne inappropriately applied to all writing) as offering a valuable set of tools within specific institutions built around contestation, such as courts, deliberative bodies, and public opinion. Each of these institutions operated in its own changing sets of assumptions, expectations, and rules to carry its work. Even various sciences had contestatory aspects, but again with different rules, different evidence, and different means of contestation. In turn I was able to understand rhetoric in noncontestatory situations as reflective, intentional, effective action. This set me to looking for evidence of what counted as effective in various situations, whether in sales, education, or public information.

Recognizing the value of other perspectives meant giving up some of the argumentative fervor for my own perspective, as I recognized it was just one piece among others, in relationship to others. At the same time, I needed to recognize the force of my own continuing concerns so as not to be caught up in the worthwhile and interesting concerns of other fields I was learning from. So just as I left grammarians to worry about the complexities of parsing ambiguous sentences, I left epistemological puzzles to philosophers of science, except as they, for example, illuminated the different epistemologies within different modes of writing. Articulating one correct epistemology was not my concern. Sociology could certainly illuminate writing, and writing perhaps could illuminate certain sociological issues, such as how institutions and identities existed across space and time, but ultimately that was for sociologists to articulate in their own terms and in their own way. Similarly, as much as I saw the evolving practices of writing as historical phenomena that shaped the means of action of historical players, historians had their own forms of evidence and ways of coming to terms with that. In all these cases, they had hard-earned and productive perspectives, methods, procedures, and forms of evidence, from which I had, in fact, learned much. At best in all these cases, I could only present to them the things my writing perspective made salient to me that might be of interest to them.

The challenges in distinguishing my interests and questions from those of other fields reconfirmed my commitments to writing studies and to support the development of writing in individuals and society, even as I used tools and perspectives from other disciplines. This exercise also clarified for me another lesson: while for analytic purposes I might focus in on particular kinds of evidence and procedures and exclude others, that did not make the other dimensions vanish. It only kept them in the analytic background. I had to remember somewhere in the background all those things I was not paying attention to (i.e., temporarily forgetting). This became a personal mantra: always remember what you are forgetting.

Finally, being aware of and learning from these many perspectives helped attune me to how my investigations would be understood by others who might not share my perspective and what they might take from my research and methods.

How Will the Investigation Advance Knowledge or Help Solve Practical Problems, Even for Those of Alternative Views?

Although I continued some work that might be seen as meaningful mostly by others who had views similar to mine, I tried as much as I could to examine phenomena that could be visible to others independent of their perspective. I tried to use evidence that would speak to others and describe readily recognized phenomena, with concepts only following later as a consequence of the evidence, rather than being a priori assumptions. I examined lesser-known texts to reveal the motives, ideologies, and life circumstances that stood behind the rhetorical reasoning of those same authors’ better-known texts that influenced writing of others to follow, as I did with Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, and Adam Smith. In some later projects I presented quantitative results within detailed ethnographic contexts that clarified the validity and meaning of the evidence. In these cases and others, I tried to show readers things they could not ignore or unsee and that they would need to incorporate in their work, no matter what their perspective might be and what terms they used. Methodologically I tried to produce evidence that would be persuasive to others of different persuasions, meeting their criteria, such as educational psychologists or historians or linguists. I also presented methods that could be pursued by researchers of various perspectives, particularly in the co-edited book What Writing Does and How It Does It (Bazerman & Prior, 2004), that made phenomena such as intertextuality, genres, and activity systems operationally meaningful to researchers of various stripes. In this way, I tried to enrich other fields, without asking them overtly to change course, but just to include phenomena and methods that would open up new kinds of evidence to their analysis.

Intervening in other fields, no matter how tactfully done, has other dangers. It tempts one to take on problems only because they seem important to others and not advancing one’s personal understanding, nor even growing out of empirical evidence one has previously gathered. Approaching an issue without any special tools, resources, or approaches does not provide much energy or leverage on the issue, as one starts from an empty toolkit and weak grounding. Thus, this fourth approach to research only works well in conjunction with the prior three kinds of questions that help identify a trajectory of attention and understanding growing from one’s personal line of inquiry.

Of course, highlighting gaps in the literature or social problems can help sell the value of work at the time of publication, but that after-the-fact retelling does not necessarily match the process out of which investigations arise. More fundamentally, awareness of how people of other perspectives view phenomena can identify investigations that may be of greater reach and value. For example, when I first started working on the evolution of the experimental article in science, while some had noted that earlier scientific writing looked different than contemporary, this difference largely was seen as a quaint curiosity. Establishing major changes more systematically made the changes more consequential to researchers of various perspectives, highlighting the mutability and transformations of scientific writing.

At times, as well, recognizing one socially important issue can lead to another. For example, as computer technology made popular the idea that we were entering an information age, I wondered what we considered information to be. This curiosity, nonetheless, was embedded within my understanding of textual practices having implicit ideologies, ontologies, and epistemologies, which changed over time and location. Thus, the understanding of evolving meanings of information would be highly consequential for multiple contemporary genres and communicative social systems, such as anti-nuclear activism and environmentalism. The etymological arcania of the meanings of the word “information” revealed a major transformation worth investigating just after World War II in controversies over nuclear testing, which contrasted public information with the classified information surrounding nuclear weaponry. Within a decade, the anti-testing newsletter Information evolved into the journal Environment (Bazerman, 2001).

Occasional Catalysts, This Moment, and Your Moments

Throughout my career, catalytic moments, opportunities, or resources brought together the multiple partly formed ideas I had in mind. Sometimes a conference or publication opportunity coalesced projects; sometimes it was running across a text or other source; sometimes it was a chance conversation. But in all such cases, catalytic moments depended on me having unresolved interests in mind that could come together in a fresh way.

For example, as I had been working on the history and evolution of scientific writing, the applications to social science had been only at the margin of my attention, but a University of Iowa conference on the rhetoric of inquiry in the social sciences led me to explore how scientific textual models became influential in the social sciences. Addressing this issue turned my attention to the impact of the Style Manual of the American Psychological Association throughout the social sciences. Studying the history of the manual leading to its current lengthy manifestation, and placing the manual’s prescriptions within the varied practices of the field and the motives of the major actors, revealed the ideological influences that regulated and shaped modes of representation (Bazerman, 1987). I would not have done that work without the conference invitation, but the work embodied my interests, procedures, understanding, and methods to that point. Similarly, a bit later, participation in a conference on the Rhetoric of Economics catalyzed a vague curiosity I had had about Adam Smith since I first heard of his early book on rhetoric (Smith, 1983). This opportunity drew me into a review of his life and extensive corpus (Bazerman, 1993b) to understand his social and philosophical project and how he realized it rhetorically in The Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1976).

A different kind of catalytic moment occurred when I entered the Edison Historical Site and Archive in South Orange, New Jersey. I had been working on a book about the history of representations of electricity, and had done work on a few earlier electricians. I was planning on discussing Edison in my final chapter, but my first morning looking at the Edison papers presented me with an entirely different vision of a book growing out of the Edison archives. The project would reveal the complex social project of bringing electric light and centrally produced power into our lives (Bazerman, 1999). The first letters I examined from the days immediately following his first announcement that he had solved the problem of producing electric lamps (which he had in fact yet to do) connected him with many of the social worlds in which he would need to create presence, meaning, and value in turning his ambition into a global material reality. In understanding Edison’s communicative strategies in these documents, I was led into the journalistic, financial, patent, civic, laboratory, technological, market, corporate, and cultural worlds of 19th-century United States. This framing of the materials evident to me after only a few hours reading letters and looking at the archive indices, however, was only the catalytic consequence of my prior investigations and the questions I had been formulating over the years (see Bazerman, 2023, chapter 22, for a fuller story).

Although many of my projects had smaller or larger catalytic moments giving hazy projects a coherent shape, I currently lack a sharp focus for my current work. I feel morally impelled to use what I have learned about the social impact of writing to contribute to action on climate change, but I am still trying to figure out where to take the impulse. Climate change, of course, is most directly a material physical problem, which many in geologic, atmospheric, physical, engineering, and other sciences have been hard at work at for decades. Yet the problem was brought to crisis by human actions; consequences will impact all dimensions of human society; and solutions will involve human cooperation, collaboration, communication, and action. So written communication plays some significant role in multiple parts of the story.

Until now, the communicative problem has largely been conceived as making the science available, meaningful, and pressing to the larger public, so that individuals would make wise consumer choices and would act as a political force on government policy. But important decisions that affect climate are also made within and between non-governmental human organizations, whether in energy, insurance, vehicle manufacturing, agriculture, financial investment, conference organization, NGO delivery of services, or entertainment. Each of these, and many others, have their modes of communication, reasoning, and calculation, humanly enacted through documents that travel between and within these organizations. Even though individuals as citizens may have substantial knowledge of the threats of climate change, they do not always perceive how they can act on that knowledge within their consequential organizational roles. I have taken a few publication opportunities I have had, such as this one, to begin to make this case, but this really only begins the inquiry (see also Bazerman, 2025, 2026).

This line of thinking also got me talking to people who have been finding novel ways of communicating with others about the climate in ways that might influence decisions and actions as individuals or as members of organizations. These interviews have become the basis for a Substack newsletter, Words into Climate Action (https://charlesbazerman.substack.com/), that shares the practical strategies and accomplishments of these creative climate communicators, with the hope that others might be inspired and follow their lead. Similarly, I am co-editing a more traditional academic volume that documents effective educational and public climate communication projects (Bazerman et al., under contract). Both the newsletter and the volume elevate projects developed by others that have helped me learn more about the problem area, but my own major project has not yet taken shape. Perhaps simply sharing the accomplishment of others may be enough and may be as much as I can accomplish given the enormity of the problem and my advancing age. But I still hope that catalytic lightning will strike and I will know exactly what I need to do.

So this is where I am now, where you may be now, having some sense of a study, but not yet knowing what can or should be done. This has often been the uncomfortable dilemma of forming research, waiting out time in the haze, until I know what I am searching for. There are so many wonderful, illuminating, and useful things to be found about writing as we each reach out into the unknown. Perhaps some of my questions may resonate with you, perhaps others will not. Your questions ultimately are your own, born in your own moments of inquiry and discovery.