So...what is our research question?
One thing many Gemstone students and alumni will tell you is that your research question is almost never the same from when you first propose the idea in GEMS102 (second semester freshman year) to when you present your findings at Senior Thesis Conference at the end of your four years in the program. That being said, this first month of sophomore year has been pretty stressful for our team, in terms of narrowing down the scope of our research direction.
We met with our wonderful mentor, Dr. Dwyer, for the first time as an entire team this past week. We had been tossing a few ideas around for a while now, but having a formal meeting with our mentor to seriously discuss our research direction was extremely valuable and helpful. We don't have to write our lit review (due at the end of September! Yikes!) with a concrete research question (or questions) in mind, but we definitely needed to narrow down our scope. Now that we have had one mentor meeting and a few team-only meetings, Team MORALS is on a very good track in terms of our research, methodology, and feasibility.
We don't want to edit our research question on the other pages just yet, but some ideas we have been considering include: personality types and their influences on moral/political opinion; finding underlying agreement among most Americans, regardless of political views; and compiling a set of American values that most Americans share. For instance, one can say that justice and freedom are two big American values, but where is the hard evidence for that? And since the demographic makeup of our population has changed drastically over the last couple centuries, have our values also changed since our Founding Fathers' time? Do most ISTJs strongly oppose mandated healthcare?
We don't know the answers to these questions. But that's what our next three years are for.
