What an Investigation Is

Research gathers what is known about a subject. An investigation answers a specific question about a specific thing, and it can fail. That difference is the whole discipline. Research has no stop condition, so it never tells you it is finished; an investigation that cannot fail was never testing anything.

The Casework Cycle has seven stages, each governed by one of the ten frameworks:

• Commission asks what is being asked and what would answer it.
• Baseline separates what is established from what you are carrying in.
• The hypothesis set lays out every explanation, including the ones you dislike.
• Collection takes what you may lawfully take, and preserves it.
• Verification asks whether each item is what it claims to be.
• Reconstruction puts events in order and links people to each other.
• The finding states what you know, how sure you are, and what would change your mind.

The cycle is not a conveyor belt. Verification sends you back to collection; a new hypothesis sends you back to the baseline. The cycle fixes not the order of your days but the standard each stage must meet before its output is allowed downstream.

One rule governs all of it. At every stage, the output is labeled with its evidence state: Observed, Corroborated, Inferred, Hypothesized or Unknown. A case can fail not because someone lied but because an inference traveled three stages wearing the coat of an observation.