 Okay, so you've started the inquiry process in a research area of interest. You've identified some potential topics, maybe started thinking about how to form these topics into research questions, and come up with a starting place for search keywords to use in your search string. Now what? In the beginning phase of your research, it's important to take the time to ask yourself, is my research topic viable? And by viable, we mean, are people talking about what I'm talking about? In short, is there any research out there on my topic? And if yes, what is the conversation that's already happening around these ideas that I have? This is where preliminary research comes into play. It's a starting place for you to search without concern, but instead work to develop your own understanding on the topic and develop different ways in which you can talk about it. Where do you search for preliminary research? I don't know, Google it. But in all seriousness, Google is a good starting place for some of this kind of information. Preliminary research involves running Google searches, checking Wikipedia pages, and informally consulting experts that you know. At the end stage of your preliminary research, you should be able to identify for any given topic, keywords or terms that are important to the topic at hand, issues or controversies relating to that topic, what the sides are to this topic, what are the different ways in which researchers have come down on one side or the other of that particular question. And you might discover that there's more than just two sides to a particular question. And then, what research questions are already being investigated surrounding this topic area of interest? Let's look at an example of how conducting preliminary research can help us refine our keywords and inform our topic interests. Say we wanted to explore the topic of cell phones. And how they particularly present barriers to a particular sustainable community. Let's define what that community is. There's a lot of different ways that we could take this. We could look at a community of friends or family or maybe cell phone use in the school environment. We want to choose just one of these communities to focus in on. For our purposes, we're going to take a look at the community of family. What are my possible research topics within this idea? Start with some broad categories. We might think about cell phones and friendship. Or we might think about cell phone use with kids or teenagers. Or we might be thinking about cell phones and parents. Those are some big category ideas. And then let's think a little bit more specifically about some of these broad categories. How can we narrow them down? Make a list of these sub points for each of your categories that you've developed. Let's hone in on one of the ones that we identified. For example, cell phones and parents. We might think about the subcategories of monitoring kids in their privacy, passwords, GPS tracking, things like that. Or we might think about cell phones and parents in limiting screen time for children or limiting their access to social media. Or we might think about how phones disrupt family time and parental use of phones and what's that doing to a particular kid's development or something like that. Choose one of these narrow ideas and start conducting some preliminary research. We're going to look more closely at parental use of phones and its disruption to family time. The goal of preliminary research is to read more accessible forms of information. Ones we might be familiar with, such as newspaper articles, magazine articles, so that we can start to develop our understanding of the topic. So we're going to begin our search with Google. Open Google and type in your initial thoughts for keywords. It's okay to begin this broad. In fact, that's kind of the purpose of preliminary research. For the topic we're interested in exploring, let's start with cell phones and parents. Review your Google results and zero in on the results that seem most relevant. Focus on the ones that come from more reputable resources such as well-known publications like newspapers and magazines, or maybe well-known organizations. As you're scanning your lists of results, it's helpful to look at the URL that's above the blue title link for your result entry. For example, I see this first one comes from Psychology Today, which is a well-known psychology magazine. As we scroll down, we get other interesting things like this result from commonsensemedia.org. I don't know that much about commonsense media yet, but the .org tells me that this is a particular organization, no idea a good place to begin. We also have things from The Atlantic, which is another well-known magazine, as well as pbs.org. Each source will contribute something different to the conversation depending on the purpose and intent of that source. For example, the commonsensemedia.org source. Clicking into this result tells us that this is a resource for parenting and how to introduce cell phones to their children. And there's lots of different ways in which parents can interact and use this website, and they even have it set up by age range. If we scroll down on this page, we actually see this little verb that tells us a little bit about who commonsense is and what they're publishing on. And we learn that they're the nation's leading non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families. If we wanted to know even more about them, we could click on the About Us page and read about who they are, what they do, and where they get their information. This is all things that go into evaluating the kind of source of information that you're looking for to determine its credibility and being included as part of this conversation. If we return to our search results, notice we also get one from popular magazines, such as The Atlantic, and this one's called Parents' Screen Time is Hurting Kids. Popular magazines are a great place to start your research because they can connect you to other research and help develop your keyword vocabulary. Part of the purpose of a popular magazine is to summarize information that's already out there, or maybe summarize research studies that's been conducted on this topic area. So oftentimes the information is a little bit more general and easier to digest at this beginning phase. One of the best uses of popular source magazine articles like this is develop your keyword vocabulary. And if we were to scroll through and read this article from The Atlantic in its entirety, we'd learn lots of useful keywords that we can actually go ahead and add to our search. Some really specific ones, like continuous partial attention. Or, if we scroll down a little bit further, a phrase like parental inattention, or distracted parenting, or the even more specific term, technoference. And if we were to lead a little bit further, we actually see that this is a term that's been developed by psychologist. Through this one article, we're developing quite a few sophisticated ways of talking about our research topic. Additionally, it also leads us to important names and important research studies that may have been conducted. All of these things we can use to build our understanding of the topic and develop more sophisticated ways to search when we turn to our more advanced searching tools, such as our library resources, like a library database. The final goal of preliminary research is to start to develop your understanding of the issues or controversies surrounding a particular topic and what the different size or positions might be. The kinds of sources we read in preliminary research often summarize these sides, like in the case of this article from pbs.org. We actually learn the parent's perspective on cell phone use. Or, in the case of the article from psychology today, we're actually presented with a list of five different studies and what they're saying about this particular topic. These are all different kinds of research that are entering in that conversation. We could then go and look up these different studies and potentially use them in our paper. Use the preliminary research stage to discover what these sides of the issues or controversies are so that you can learn what questions others have asked about your topic. And then use that to inform the own argument that you're trying to make about this topic.