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History EE help


ShittyWok

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So I'm currently in the 1st year of IB and it's time for us juniors to come up with a topic/research question. I've decided to make mine "The differences in business strategies of Andrew Carnegie and Steve Jobs". I'm wondering how to change my research question into a more formal one and whether or not this would go into the history area or the economics area. I personally don't want to go into the economics area because there's really nobody to "interview" so how would I morph it into a research question that belongs in history?

Thanks!

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I think your title is too broad and it won't be something that the IB wants.

First you should pick a subject area and THEN find a research question, rather than finding a research question and then trying to squeeze it to fit one of the subject areas, when you will likely find that it doesn't really fit under any of the subject areas allowed by the IB.

Usually history EEs focus on an event, while an economics EE normally focuses on a particular industry/organization in a specific geographical location. For a history EE you should pick a historic event (the IB defines this as an event that happened at least 10 years ago) and what you could do with that is examine the different causes of the event, the different sides, etc...

IB likes questions that start with "To what extent". So you could phrase your question in the form of "To what extent was the victory of [insert battle here] the result of [insert something a country did here, a particular policy that was implemented, etc.] or something like that. It isn't necessary to start with "To what extent" but it helps in a way because in order to stay on topic you have to evaluate the role of whatever you choose, stating possible strengths and weaknesses as well. I'm not a history EE expert but hope this helps.

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Nah, the point is Steve Jobs is not counted as "history" yet (quite an interesting ToK issue here, but let's accept it for now), and "business strategies" does not sound good for a history EE, I guess. Why don't you just do your EE in one of the topics covered in your course? I would recommend doing it in your Paper 1 syllabus (Arab-Israel conflict for me), as you would gain a good background knowledge for the real paper, too.

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