Doing the research isn’t always the hardest part of empirical work. Once you’ve designed your study and gathered your results, you still have to write up your book or article and present your research findings in a clear, convincing manner.

There are many different ways to structure empirical writing, but a common and recommended place to begin is with the research question. When you are writing, you might find your research question has changed slightly over the course of your project. This is perfectly normal. Your research question must accurately reflect what you will answer, but your understanding of the questions involved will develop over the course of your research. A mentor once told me that the unspoken secret of social science writing is oftentimes, we write the research question last – when we finally understand what we have learned.

A good research question requires work and refinement. It must be narrower than the research topic: ‘policing and compliance’ or ‘why people break the law’ are examples of topics that no single research project could present reasonable evidence for. (Over time, we do learn and theorize about research topics as we learn the answers to more and more relevant research questions). However, a research question can’t be too specific: ‘why did my neighbor have a gathering of six people last Saturday when only four were allowed’ is a very niche, particular topic that will not be interesting to a general audience. Something operating at the meso-level of specificity – what reasons do Dutch citizens express for gathering in large groups during COVID-19? – is ideal. This question might help motivate theorization and generalization about broader topic-level ideas.

After you begin by stating the research question, it is useful to motivate the question – what makes this question particularly timely or interesting? Why should readers be interested in the answer? Then, you may proceed to describe the parts of your project in a logical order. Oftentimes, writeups proceed from the introduction by describing the literature review, theory, methodology, findings, and conclusions