COB 202 - Social Issues

The PIPA method is a process that can help you think through how the articles and other sources you find are contributing to your research project. PIPA helps you consider HOW the sources you find fit in with your main topic and helps you identify what types of sources you may need to find.

Provide relevant background

Sources that: provides the relevant background information your audience - i.e., those who you are targeting with your research project -- needs to know to understand your research topic. In a class project, the audience is often your professor, but it can also be your peers or an external client.

NOTE: only provide the details that your audience NEEDs to understand your topic and specific claim. Avoid summarizing everything that exists on your topic and drowning the audience in information. For example, if you are creating a presentation for other students in your Economics class, you can assume that they already know certain information based on what you’ve collectively learned in the course.

Sources can be: From encyclopedias, books, or scholarly articles, related to your topic that are now considered general knowledge or accepted facts for your disciplinary area.

Example: If you are researching the work culture at Google, background information could be company data on Google including how many employees Google has or an encyclopedia entry that outlines Google’s history.

Investigate the claim

Sources that: help to establish the claim or argument that you are making on a topic. These sources can provide you with evidence of WHY your claim matters and/or serves as an example that you will be exploring or analyzing in your research assignment

Sources can be: a news article, dataset, case study, media like a documentary or tv show, scholarly article, etc.

Example: Continuing with the same example, a source from this category could be a current event, Google’s Diversity Annual Report, or the scholarly article Google: A Reflection of Culture, Leader, and Management.

Prepare evidence

Sources that: outline the argument for and against your claim and/or provide evidence. This could be research you conduct to test your claims (e.g., interviews, surveys, etc.), or it can be information written by other authors you are agreeing with, disagreeing with, or whose research you are writing about in your own project.

Sources can be: Data you’ve gathered and analyzed (e.g., survey, interviews, etc.), but can also be news articles, government sources, sources from professional organizations, scholarly articles, etc., that provide evidence for or against your claim.

Example: If your claim is trying to determine the core elements that make Google a celebrated work environment, you might also include this article on Google’s Once Happy Offices Feel the Chill of Layoffs to address what might be negatively impacting their work culture and by doing so strengthen your argument.

Associate with the main themes

Sources that: connect to the main themes or trends related to your topic and/or situate your topic in a broader context (i.e., regional area, industry, parent topic, etc.). These could also be resources focused on a related topic which explores similar themes that can be tied back to your topic.

Sources can be: books, scholarly articles, news, and more!

Example: This could be a source that more broadly explores the work culture at large technology companies as a main theme, which you could then use to establish how Google is like or unlike other employers in the industry, like this article Tech Companies Leading the Way to Great Work Culture.

NOTE: All sources you use in a research assignment should first be evaluated for quality before you use it.

The PIPA method is inspired by: Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review 27.1 (2008): 72-86. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 4 February 2014.