How does racism affect children?
How does beauty standards affect how we treat other people?
How does symbolism and imagery connect to Pecola’s life?
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These are all valuable questions, but the first two are very, very broad and point at phenomena in the “real world” not in Morrison’s novel. One might ask these questions of Morrison’s novel, but the question needs to be focused more tightly on the novel. Roye, for example, essentially asks, “how does racism ‘disrupt’ the girlhoods of children in Morrison’s work, and how does this disruption interact with the Bildungsroman genre”? Your question might not be this detailed–she’s a professional critic with a broad range of reference writing a 25 paper essay and 252 students come at thing differently–but the way she poses her question is a good model. The last question–on Pecola and “symbolism and imagery”–is more “literary,” which is good, but it’s very general. What kind of “imagery”? What kinds of “connections”? In order for the research not to be overwhelming, it’s good to start from a more focused question.