10 replies to this topic

[pinkopal]

Hi!
Is it OK to investigate the economical (or the political, social, etc.) causes of a war for the historical investigation?
Thus, the reseach question would be: how did the economical factors lead to the outbreak of...

[Emy Glau-ski]

Hi!
Is it OK to investigate the economical (or the political, social, etc.) causes of a war for the historical investigation?
Thus, the reseach question would be: how did the economical factors lead to the outbreak of...

Yes that's perfectly acceptable for a history IA. Just pick one of them, because doing more than one would probably be too broad

[pinkopal]

Thank you so much!!

[pinkopal]

But what if I want to analyze two aspects such as the economical and the social factors and investigate the extent to which they were the main causes of a war.
Would this be too broad?

[Aeronymous]

I think that generally the causes of a war are to broad of a topic for a history IA, remember that the word limit is 2000 and the actual analysis part is only about 700 (maybe 800 max.) words. Even if you specialise on one (or two) factors, you still have to compare them to other causes to answer the "to what extent".

I chose a really specific question (and fun as well )
"How historically accurate is the account of the Battle of Bastogne in the 6th Episode of the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers"?
Such a comparison is really nice to do since in the B section ("summary of evidence"; you can put two lists with evidence one of facts that are in the series and one list with real facts that support/ counterclaim the facts in the series, so you can make it clearly structured).
In the analysis part you just basically compare and contrast and in the conclusion judge whether the compare part overweighed the contrast one (eg. how historically accurate)
Just remember to footnote and cite not only the B section but also the analysis section (and that footnotes do not count towards the word count, even though some MS word versions do)

I got a 6 in History HL (I didnt do as well in the exams is probably what cost me a 7)

Edited by Aeronymous, Jul 08, 2012 - 08:58.

[pinkopal]

and if I change the research question into: "How did the economical and (lets say) social factors lead to...."
In this way I will argue and investigate only these two factors. Would this still be too broad?

[Where Love Died Laughing]

Can you tell us what war you had in mind? If you had one of the larger wars in mind, such as WWI or WWII, you'd probably have to be even more specific. For example, for my IA I did Manchuria as a cause of WWII and still had trouble fitting everything into the word count.

[pinkopal]

i don't have a specific war in mind. I am not considering at all both ww1 and ww2 because I want to investigate the causes of a "small" war.

[Where Love Died Laughing]

Alright... so probably a limited war. In that case, I would stick to just one factor (ie. economic) and make an outline. If it seems like it's too broad a subject then just limit yourself to one particular event (like I did for the Manchurian Crisis), but overall it's a perfectly acceptable RQ.

[pinkopal]

But do you think that I can find enough factors and documents if I focus only on the economical factors?

[Where Love Died Laughing]

Well, it depends on the particular war you have in mind of course, but I think you're set with pretty much any war you can think of. Why not first think of the war you want to investigate, and then weigh the various factors. You'll definitely have more than enough to focus on just one factor, but it depends on the war which particular factor that would be.