Research Question Update
Colin already mentioned this on his blog, but as a result of our initial question being far too broad, we decided to scrap the drug and prostitution elements (which, quite honestly, comes as a bit of a relief since their inclusion was a bit contrived in the first place) in favor of focusing on the bicycling culture alone. This would naturally lead us to a slightly more refined question that goes something like:
What effect does the bicycling culture of Amsterdam have on the overall health of its citizens?
However, this question still is far too broad for the time we have and has an impossibly huge number of ways to test and answer it, so to focus it a bit more, I would suggest something more along the lines of:
How does frequent bicycle use in Amsterdam affect the health of the city’s urban youth?
With this question, we can limit our study to a much more specific group, making the investigation much easier to focus. By looking specifically at urban youth, we can create questions catered specifically to them rather than to the entire population. Also, to answer this question we could look at how frequently urban youth make visits to the doctor, how frequently they have to stay home due to illness, and even investigate appetite and average hours of sleep per night. I feel that focusing the question to a specific group like this will help to make it manageable in the time we have in Amsterdam. It doesn’t even have to be urban youth, I just think that they might be the most accessible.
