So what!

I've just written the abstract for one of my honour's classes for the tenth time and each iteration is kicked off by the question - 'so what?'

It feels like my topic is hiding from me. I ask 'so what?' then re-write the abstract to answer this question and end up asking again 'so what?' ad infinitum. Why would someone care about this question? What are the broader implications for society?

Is my topic completely irrelevant to humanity?

I've now read Howard Becker's "Writing for Social Scientists" cover to cover (as promised) and the answer wasn't in there (although there were about a hundred other answers to very important questions that researchers ask). I'm about to start Becker's book "Tricks of the Trade" and I suspect it isn't in there either.

Booth et al may have the answer I'm after. Their book "The Craft of Research" has a section called  'From a Merely Interesting Question to its Wider Significance'. Bingo!

They suggest asking so what and suggest asking yourself the following:
    So what if I don't know or understand how snow geese know where to go in winter, or how     fifteenth-century violin players tuned their instruments, or why the Alamo story has become a myth? So what if I can't answer those questions? 

So I asked myself 'so what if I don't know how community gardens function in contemporary Australia?' And I found the answer occurred alongside a sensation of indignation.
Of course it is important to understand a phenomena that is increasingly occurring but understudied.

As the practice of setting up community gardens grows those who are doing the setting up will be looking for knowledge of the topic. They will find the the vast majority of the literature is not representative of the Australian context. A great deal of it is from north America (66% of papers in an extensive literature review by Guitart et al, 2011) and only a small slice is Australian (13% according to the previously mentioned study). They will also find that community gardens are described with such a diversity of characteristics that they are rarely explicitly defined in the research (Guitart et al found that 63% of the papers they studied offered no definition). Where does this leave the policy maker or practitioner? My research enables them to understand community gardens according to what they currently are rather than according to old, redundant ideas of what a community garden is.

So here perhaps, I have my 'so what' answered and I can move on to the next steps in my research and stop torturing myself.