Developing A Topic
When you choose your topic, you need to:
- understand a topic
- restate your topic as a focused research question
Developing a good topic is not easy. As you proceed through this step, your topic should become narrow and focused enough to be interesting, yet remain broad enough to find adequate information for your research. Before you select your topic, make sure you know what your final research project should look like. Each instructor, or class, will have somewhat different requirements and purposes.
Understand Your Topic
Having a basic understanding of your topic will help you throughout your research. To get a good overview, read a specialized encyclopedia article on the topics you are considering. You can locate encyclopedias in the Reference Collection of the UVSC Library (3rd floor) or your local public library.Reading an encyclopedia article helps you in the following ways:
- gives an overview of the topic, including the history
- identifies subtopics
- discusses important people
- exposes you to the jargon for the field
- basic statistics
- shows related topics or ideas.
TIP: Be sure to look up your topic in the index to locate cross-references too! This can help you get the broader view of your topic or help you identify subtopics you may be more interested in.
Restate Your Topic As A Focused Research Question
Research requires a question for which no ready answer is available. What do you want to know about a topic? Asking a topic as a question (or series of related questions) has several advantages:
- Questions require answers. A topic is hard to cover completely because it typically encompasses too many related issues; but a question has an answer, even if it is ambiguous or controversial.
| TOPIC | QUESTION |
|---|---|
| drug testing | How accurate are testing methods for performance enhancing drugs? |
- Questions give you a way of evaluating answers. A clearly stated question helps you decide which information will be useful. A broad topic may tempt you to print or save information you think you may use, but you're not sure how. This will slow down the research process. A question also makes it easier to know when you have enough information to stop your research because you have clearly answered your question.
- A clear open-ended question calls for real research and thinking. Asking a question with no direct answer makes research and writing more meaningful. Assuming that your research may solve significant problems or expand the knowledge base of a discipline involves you in more meaningful activity of community and scholarship.
- An answer will help you write a thesis statement. Students often struggle to write a thesis statement for papers, and a research question will help you because the answer becomes the thesis of your research project.
TIP: Don't create a question that can be answered by yes or no.
Practice
Write down the answers for this assignment. You will be using them later to complete the exercise at the end of the tutorial.
- Create your focused research question.
Continue -
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