How to Turn a Novel Into Research in Cultural Studies
If you published a sociological novel, you can use this as the basis for a longer research project or scholarly article. For example, if you wrote a novel based on the trends of marriage and family during the 1970s, you can use the facts you gathered from your research for a study on how marriage patterns have changed since that decade. You can also modernize your research by finding new data from the early 2000s and interview random people, university professors, and sociologists in your city.
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Instructions
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Decide on a research interest. If you wrote a novel about the issue of child abuse in the inner-city and you've always wanted to do further research on the poverty and lack of community resources that sometimes lead to this abuse, research possible solutions to poverty in the inner-city and also discuss factors such as race, class and gender in your study.
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Build on the research you used for the novel. If you have a lot of research for a novel you published about hip-hop's influence on social movements in Latin America, add to this by gathering new information that pertains to hip-hop's influence on other continents such as Africa, Asia and Europe and make comparisons between these continents and Latin America.
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Use your characters as a basis for new research. For example, if your recent novel dealt with three teenagers who struggled with low-self worth and sexual abuse while living with foster parents, turn their stories into a research project on sexual abuse issues in the lives of teens who are in the foster care system. Get credible information from teens who survived sexual abuse while in foster care, scholarly journal articles, government agency statistics, community acivists, psychologists and ministers.
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References
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