BenShow
New member
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2026
- Messages
- 14
I need to say this somewhere that isn't my advisor's office because I'm not ready to have that conversation yet, but I think I've been working on the wrong research question for two years and I'm not sure what to do with that realization 
My dissertation is in environmental sociology, focused on how rural communities in the southeast communicate risk around flooding events. The original research question was about information channels — local government versus social networks versus media. I've collected data, done interviews, built a literature review. The work is real.
But the more I've sat with my data over the last few months, the more I think the actually interesting question buried in my findings is about trust rather than information channels. The communities I studied aren't information-poor — they know about flood risk. The variable that seems to predict response behavior is who they trust to interpret that risk, and that's a fundamentally different question than the one I set out to answer.
My committee approved my original question. My prospectus was built around it. Pivoting now feels terrifying but writing toward a question that my own data is quietly undermining feels dishonest.
Has anyone gone through a significant research question shift mid-dissertation? I'm genuinely trying to understand whether this is a catastrophic problem or a normal part of the research process that I'm catastrophizing. My gut says the trust angle is not just different but better — more original, more directly supported by my actual findings, more useful to the literature.
But the practical question of how you bring that conversation to a committee that approved a different direction, two years in, with fieldwork already complete... I don't know how to start that conversation without it feeling like an admission of failure when I actually think it might be a sign that the research is working the way research is supposed to work.
My dissertation is in environmental sociology, focused on how rural communities in the southeast communicate risk around flooding events. The original research question was about information channels — local government versus social networks versus media. I've collected data, done interviews, built a literature review. The work is real.
But the more I've sat with my data over the last few months, the more I think the actually interesting question buried in my findings is about trust rather than information channels. The communities I studied aren't information-poor — they know about flood risk. The variable that seems to predict response behavior is who they trust to interpret that risk, and that's a fundamentally different question than the one I set out to answer.
My committee approved my original question. My prospectus was built around it. Pivoting now feels terrifying but writing toward a question that my own data is quietly undermining feels dishonest.
Has anyone gone through a significant research question shift mid-dissertation? I'm genuinely trying to understand whether this is a catastrophic problem or a normal part of the research process that I'm catastrophizing. My gut says the trust angle is not just different but better — more original, more directly supported by my actual findings, more useful to the literature.
But the practical question of how you bring that conversation to a committee that approved a different direction, two years in, with fieldwork already complete... I don't know how to start that conversation without it feeling like an admission of failure when I actually think it might be a sign that the research is working the way research is supposed to work.
