Capstone 2026/27 (Group 9)

Workshop 1: Finding questions

Violeta Haas

Department of Political Science

School of Social Sciences and Philosophy

Trinity College Dublin

Today

  1. Welcome
  2. Roadmap and assessment
  3. Your introductions & research interests
  4. What makes a strong question
  5. Reading and notes
  6. Next steps

Welcome!

Hi! 👋

Violeta Haas
Assistant Professor in Political Science
New at Trinity College Dublin

Previously

  • Postdoc, IAST / Toulouse School of Economics
  • PhD, DYNAMICS (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2024)

Research How institutions and elites shape perceptions of and behaviour toward marginalized groups (esp. immigration & LGBTQ+ rights). Also party competition, social norms, (hate) crime, and protest.

Methods Causal identification & computational social science. Experiments plus multimodal LLM applications.

How to reach me

  • General questions: Ask during workshops (things that may interest others too, such as deadlines, readings, logistics)
  • Individual questions: violeta.haas@tcd.ie. You can also approach me after class
    (personal circumstances, grades, anything sensitive)
  • Office hours: by appointment

How this group works

Practicalities

  • Module: POU44000 Capstone Group 9
  • When/where: Thu 9–11am (bi-weekly), 4085 Arts Building
  • MT workshops: 24 Sep, 8 Oct, 22 Oct, TBD, TBD
  • Supervision: happens primarily in workshops
  • Important documents: you should all read Overall Capstone guide + theme syllabus

Assessment

  • Participation — 10%
  • Short submissions — 15% (four pieces across MT)
  • Research proposal — compulsory, ungraded (11 Dec)
  • Dissertation — 65%
  • Podcast — 10%

Michaelmas roadmap

Workshops

  • Workshop 1: Finding questions (today)
  • Workshop 2: Narrowing it down (Thu 8 Oct)
  • Workshop 3: Locking in (Thu 22 Oct)
  • Workshop 4: Situating the project (Thu 12 Nov)
  • Workshop 5: Design & feasibility (Thu 26 Nov)

Short submissions: (Mon 11:59 pm)

  1. Three abstracts: 5 Oct
  2. Refined RQ: 19 Oct
  3. Lit review draft: 9 Nov
  4. Research design draft: 23 Nov
  5. Formative proposal: 11 Dec

What we do in workshops

  • Most of the time: discuss your ideas, feedback from peers and me
  • From Workshop 2 onward: present what you submitted on Monday
  • Short teaching blocks where they help
  • Participation = attendance + quality of contributions + discussant roles

Your introductions

Take your time

  • Your name
  • One area or question you are currently curious about
  • What you already bring:
    • relevant courses
    • seminar papers you wrote
    • special skills you have (e.g. advanced statistics, languages)
    • other background that may matter (e.g., in-depth case knowledge)

Work on your topics (≈15–20 min)

For each of the 2–3 broader questions/topics you brought, work through these points questions.

  1. What do you want to know? What is the central question/problem/issue/puzzle?
  2. How did you arrive at this question/research area? contradicting theories/gap/everyday observation, …?
  3. Why do you think it is worth doing/knowing? What is the rationale for pursuing research on this question?
  4. What do related papers already say? What explanations are already out there? What might you build on, extend, or push back against?
  5. How hard will it be to gather evidence and where might it come from? surveys, documents, media, interviews, existing or new data collection, …?

Your Turn!

What “good” looks like

Ideal structure of an empirical paper

  • Abstract
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
  • Theory
  • Research design
  • Results
  • Conclusion

By December proposal should cover a draft of: Abstract + Introduction (RQ) + lit + theory + design.

What is a research question?

A research question is one that:

  1. Has significance for a topic or issue relating to our field
  2. Is researchable (it can be answered through conducting research)
  3. Has not yet been answered definitively

Adapted from Halperin & Heath (2020), Political Research: Methods and Practical Skills (3rd ed.), ch. 4.

1. Significance

  • Dual significance:
  1. Real world importance: the topic should matter for political, social, or economic life — for understanding something that significantly affects people’s lives, or for understanding and predicting events that might be harmful or beneficial.
  1. Speak to identifiable scholarly literature: Research is expected to contribute empirically, conceptually, or theoretically to an existing literature.

What do you think about this research question?

Does the colour of campaign posters predict which party’s volunteers smile more while canvassing?

2. Researchable

Can be answered through conducting research with the available resources.

  • If you cannot imagine what evidence would speak for or against an answer, it is not yet a research question.

Feasibility check (early)

Methods can wait… doability cannot!

3. Not yet answered definitively

You must show that:

  • your question has not been addressed, or
  • existing research has failed to resolve debates about your question, or
  • there is still more that can be done to improve the answers that have so far been offered

→ Locate your question in the literature (do not reinvent). Improving answers can mean being more systematic or bringing in new cases or angles.

From topic → question

Too broad

“Immigration and public opinion”

“Protest and politics”

“Hate crime and threat perceptions”

Concrete RQs the three articles pose

Hangartner et al. (2019): Does exposure to the refugee crisis make natives more hostile?

Haas et al. (2026): Do bystanders—citizens who observe protests without participating—change protest-related attitudes and behavior?

Dancygier et al. (2022): Do fears over mate competition drive anti-refugee hate crime?

Finding a question

Questions rarely appear fully formed. Common entry points:

  • A real-world event or pattern that feels under-explained
  • A contradiction between theories, or between theory and observation
  • A gap left open by prior work
  • Extending a paper you already know: new case, scope condition, mechanism, or outcome
  • Borrowing an idea/theory from an unrelated field and asking if it can help us explain phenomena in political science (Dancygier et al. 2022; Cikara et al. 2022)

Example 1: Hangartner et al. (2019)

RQ: Does exposure to the refugee crisis make natives more hostile?

How they got there

  • 2015–16 refugee crisis: sudden large arrivals in Greece (Aegean islands) as a main entry point: chaotic management, political backlash
  • Beyond far-right vote shares, little causal evidence on natives’ attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement.
  • Ordinary comparisons fail: refugee flows are not random (selection confounds hostility)
  • Aegean islands offer a good design: some received many arrivals (closer to Turkey), others almost none. Open a chance to study direct exposure in an otherwise similar setup.

Motivation: major real-world event + causal identification gap

Example 2: Haas et al. (2026)

RQ: Do bystanders—citizens who observe protests without participating—change protest-related attitudes and behavior?

How they got there

  • People often encounter protest incidentally, not only by joining or following the news
  • Existing work centres on participants, media exposure, or elites — bystanders are an overlooked actor in the literature
  • When public effects are studied, exposure is measured indirectly (proximity, media coverage, timing), not as actually experiencing/seeing a protest

Motivation: missing actor + imperfectly measured treatment (exposure to protest)

Example 3: Dancygier et al. (2022)

RQ: Do fears over mate competition drive anti-refugee hate crime?

How they got there

  • Mid-2010s Germany: large, male-heavy refugee inflows, anti-refugee hate crime high and uneven
  • Right-wing actors framing young refugee men as rivals on the dating/marriage market
  • Political sience literature focuses on culture and economy threat explanations
  • They add a previsouly overlooked threat perception: mating competition from evolutionary social psychology (Social Dominance Theory)

Motivation: event + overlooked discourse + theory transfer

Transfer from another field: The Ebbinghaus illusion

Which hollow circle is bigger?

Ebbinghaus illusion: two equal hollow circles surrounded by differently sized dots

→ The surrounding circles change how big the hollow ones look, even when they are the same size.

Cikara et al. (2022) transfer this intuition to group threat theory: how threatening a minority group seems can depend on the size of other minorities around it (relative size rank), not only its absolute size.

Finding a Gap: Podcasts as a source of questions

Criminal justice pipeline: Policing, Communication, Arrest, Charges, Trial, Sentencing, Appeals — Trial highlighted

Podcasts can be a surprisingly good place to stumble on a research question!

Example from my own research: I study how prohibiting a victim-blaming strategy in court can help reduce violence against minoritized groups. I first encountered it via the podcast Criminal.

Gap: We know a lot about bias and discrimination at policing, charging, sentencing,… Much less about what happens at trial

Criminal, Episode 129: “Panic Defense” (6 Dec 2019)

More reliable ways of finding a gap

Practical ways to find a gap

  • Read “suggestions for future research” in conclusions of strong papers
  • Map connections between papers (e.g. Connected Papers/ResearchRabbit) and see where studies don’t speak to each other
  • Read recent reviews, special issues, or meta-analyses in your area
  • Build on readings in modules you already took: extend, find scope-condition, or push back

Example: “future research…” in a conclusion

Dancygier, Egami, Jamal & Rischke (2022) — closing section

Dancygier et al. conclusion paragraph with yellow highlights on future research sentences

Expanding questions, identifying scope conditions

Dancygier et al. (2022) study male-heavy refugee inflows. Contemporary cases that flip or complicate the mating-market story:

(A) Ukrainian refugee inflows

Gender composition of Ukrainian refugee inflows

(B) Rising LGBTQ ID among Gen Z women

NBC News: Nearly 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, Gallup survey finds

(C) South Korea’s 4B movement

PBS News: No sex. No dating. No marriage. No children. Interest grows in 4B movement to swear off men

Reading and notes

Adapted from Lipson (2018), How to Write a BA Thesis (2nd ed.), ch. 4.

Quick check: how do you work?

Before we talk about how to take notes — what do you already use?

  • Notes while reading (paper, Word/Google Docs, Notion, Obsidian, GoodNotes, …)?
  • Bibliography/references (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, BibTeX, a spreadsheet, …)?
  • PDFs (folder system, Zotero library, annotated PDFs, …)?

→ No single “correct” way, but you need some system before the literature grows.

Capture the main points of each article - Make sure your notes capture the heart of what you are reading, phrased in your own words (not a chain of quotes).

Useful Habit

write a short “My summary” that states the argument, the main evidence or claim, and what the authors reject or set aside.

Read selectively

  • Don’t read everything; focus on works directly related to your topic.
  • Don’t read everything at the same speed; read the most important works more carefully.
  • Remember that you are reading to write something of your own.

Plagiarism and academic honesty

A major source of plagiarism is not intentional cheating… it is simple mistakes caused by bad notes.

  • If your notes mix your words with an author’s words, you may paste someone else’s phrasing into your draft without noticing
  • Always mark quotes vs paraphrase vs your own thoughts while you read
  • Record the full citation at the moment you take the note, not later from memory
  • When writing notes: put Q-quotes around everything you drag and drop from any analog or digital source

Writing Abstracts

Abstract: organisation and don’ts

Main goal: a short map of the whole project.

Organisation: question → relevance & gap → theoretical argument → empirical strategy & data → (later) main findings → contribution & implications.

  • Don’t put anything in the abstract that is not in the project itself
  • Don’t pack in unnecessary background (examples, definitions) — describe the research
  • Don’t include citations

Abstract template

Does x cause y? Everyone agrees that this issue is really important. But we do not know much about this specific question, although it matters a great deal, for these reasons. We argue that X causes Y for these other reasons. However, we expect that this effect is importantly conditioned by Z. We test our theoretical argument using a fantastic new dataset across X countries and from 1945 until 2019 that we compiled using this cutting-edge method. Using innovative super modeling, we find that X really matters for Y which is an important finding for these reasons. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of how the world works and its role in the universe.

Source: Heike Klüver

Anatomy of the template

  1. Puzzle/research question (1 sentence)
  2. Relevance & gap (1–2 sentences)
  3. Theoretical argument (1–2 sentences)
  4. Empirical strategy & data (1–2 sentences)
  5. Main results (1–2 sentences) — for Capstone drafts, phrase as expected findings/what you would learn
  6. Contribution/implications (1 sentence)

Short submission 1 (due Mon 5 Oct)

Three abstracts, ≈150 words each. Capstone abstracts are prospective (present/future tense is fine).

  • Upload by Mon 5 Oct, 11:59 pm (Blackboard)
  • Workshop 2 (Thu 8 Oct): present all three ideas and get feedback
  • After Workshop 2: choose one question to refine

Questions?

Goodbye!

See you on 8 October.