CREATING A MATRIX
From your initial forays into the sources, you should have some sense of the range of ways authors answer your question and that there are, in fact, several reasonable and defensible answers to your question. It is important to begin understanding what influences different writers to answer your question differently. You will want to start identifying the perspectives, schools of thought, sets of variables, etc., that influence the question you're trying to answer. You will also want to organize your readings into categories that will help you choose the main arguments in support of and in opposition to your thesis.