Choosing an Effective Research Topic
All right, so you’ve been assigned to write a research paper, and right now you’re at ground zero, meaning the first step, which is choosing an effective research topic. If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ll know that I’m so passionate about the proper preparation before you do anything, because your starting position determines how successful you’ll be later on.
What Is a Research Topic
And so that’s exactly what I’m going to teach you right now: an effective method. It’s going to give you some parameters to choosing good, effective researching topics. Sounds good? Let’s do this. All right, so first things first, what is a research topic? Well, it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s the topic that you want to center your research around.
What Is an Effective Research Topic
Now, the real question is, what is an effective research topic, aka a good researching topic? Well, an effective research topic is going to be a specific area within a general, broad topic. And so, why do you want to find a specific area within a general topic in the first place? It gives you focus rather than researching aimlessly with no direction.
It Simply Gives You Direction
A specific topic is going to give you a specific focus area for you to conduct your research, for you to, say, find a problem within this topic, or find that gap, maybe a common misconception, or perhaps ask a question, aka your research question. It simply gives you direction for the rest of your research. Makes sense, right?
Narrowing by Expanding
So now let’s shift our focus from what a research topic is and how to choose that effective research topic. The process that I like to teach students, it’s all about narrowing by expanding, and now that sounds contradictory, so let me explain what I mean by this.
Expand It All the Way Out
If you want to take your general given topic, you want to expand it all the way out so that you can pick a specific area within that general topic, and that’s exactly what we’re gonna do now as I explain how to do this correctly. I’m gonna work through a real-life example.
What Is Your General Topic
So step number one is, well, what is your general topic? For our example, let’s say our given topic is time management. Say we’re in an undergraduate program getting our bachelor’s in business, we’re in a critical thinking course, we’re given time management. Great, this is what we’re going to expand so we can find that specific area that we want to study within time management.
Play Matchmaker
Now, the next thing we’re going to do is what I like to call play matchmaker. Basically, we’re going to take our given topic and we’re going to match it to a few potential general topics. So why would we do this? Well, let’s think about this in terms of dating.
Two People Who Are Matched Together
You have two people who are matched together, they’ve never met, they don’t know much about each other, but there’s a possibility of a relationship, a connection being drawn between the two. This is essentially what we’re doing as our starting point for choosing our effective researching topic, because it’s going to start to give you direction of the different areas that might be suitable for your given topic.
Brainstorm a Few Specific Areas For Your Effective Research Topic
So what I want you to do is quite literally take your given topic of time management, in this case, and brainstorm a few specific areas that fall under that umbrella. So in this example, this might look something like time management and college students, time management in entrepreneurship, perhaps time management and job success.
Keep Your Topics Fairly Relevant
If you’ll notice, I’m keeping it relevant to our degree, to what class we’re in, so it wouldn’t really make sense for me to say time management and, say, a mental health problem like ADHD, or time management and life satisfaction. That wouldn’t make sense for critical thinking in a business program, so you always want to keep your topics fairly relevant to what you’re studying.
The Independent Variable and the Dependent Variables
Now, the next thing you want to do is take those working topics and we want to come up with some variations of them. So time management, that’s going to be your independent variable in this case, that’s not going to change, we’re studying time management, but college students, entrepreneurship, job success, these are variables, they’re the dependent variables here.
Working Parameters for College Students
For this example, I’m going to focus on one of those examples rather than work through all three, just so we’re really clear on what I’m doing. So let’s say in this case I choose to study time management and college students. Great, some variables for college students might be things like graduate students, undergraduate students, online college students, perhaps bachelors of science majors or business majors. These are all working parameters for college students.
Build Some Working Relationships
So now, with all these variable keywords, let’s start to build some working relationships, aka working topics, and my cheat sheet for this is that you want to keep things mutual, at least in the beginning, because we still haven’t done any preliminary research, so we don’t know anything about how these topics fit together, so we want to keep it mutual.
Using the Word “Impact” or “Effect”
And so what I recommend doing is using the word “impact” or “effect” and linking the two together. So, for example, your working topics might look something like “the impact time management has on undergraduate students,” or perhaps “the impact time management has on students enrolled in online classes,” or even “the effect time management has on students enrolled in business programs.”
Do Our Preliminary Research
So do you see how now we’re starting to try on these different areas within time management to see which relationships we like? And so why do I suggest keeping it mutual right now? Because now we can take these and do our preliminary research, and if you’ve not heard that term before, it’s simply the initial research done on your potential topics, kind of to scope them out.
A Huge Mistake Students Make When Choosing a Topic
You want to study what the current state of information is on these topics for a few reasons. So, for example, a huge mistake I see a lot of students make when choosing a topic is they’ll sit down and they’ll think about what they want to research, what’s interesting to them, what would be a good time researching, and that’s all, and they don’t really do any research until they’ve landed on that topic, they’re married to that topic, and they run into issues later on.
Looking for Two Things
So when I teach students to do preliminary research, I recommend looking for two things: number one, the amount of information available on that topic, and number two, how closely it aligns with your assignment criteria. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how interested you are in a topic if there’s not enough information available and it doesn’t fit your assignment, you’re not going to have a good time writing that paper.
Don’t Worry About Getting Cornered
And also, it’s safe to say if you’re choosing these keywords, you’re going to have some interest in these topics, so don’t worry about getting cornered into a topic that you have no interest in whatsoever. But you do want to do preliminary research at this stage, just some basic searches where you’re going to be doing the majority of your research.
Hop on Google and Google Scholar
So let’s say we hop on Google and Google Scholar, because that’s where we’re going to do our research. We’re researching these topics, just skimming the basic layers of what’s out there, and here’s our thought process. So when it comes to the time management, the effect time management has on business majors, we’re saying that’s a little too specific, there’s not a lot of information available on that topic, so we decide right there we’re not going to write about that, because that’s going to be really hard to research if there’s not enough research for us to actually use.
Focusing in on a Specific Area
So now we’re looking at time management in undergraduate students or time management and online classes. We like both of these, but we’re leaning towards undergraduate students. We’re an undergraduate student getting our bachelor’s, and we really want to see what the impact of time management has on undergraduate students. Great, now we’re focusing on a specific area to conduct our research.
Continue to Ride That Wave
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/conducting_research/research_overview/index.html
The next thing we’re going to do is continue to ride that wave, we’re going to get more specific, because the impact time management has on undergraduate students, while it’s more specific than time management, there’s still a lot of area to do research in it, that could go a lot of ways. So what you’re going to do to focus in, or narrow down, shall I say, is ask questions.
Continuing to Ask Questions
We’re going to refine by continuing to ask questions and picking apart what we mean by the impact time management has on undergraduate students. So, for example, impact, what impact are we talking about? How is time management impacting undergraduate students, or how is it affecting these students?
What Type of Student
Or perhaps, what type of time management? I know that’s our independent variable, but is there a specific time management that we want to study in regards to college students? Or perhaps college students or undergraduate students, part of me, what type of student, who are they? Is it a certain ethnicity and age range?
Research This From a Positive Perspective
There’s a lot that can go into this, and so let’s say this is what we come up with first: impact time management has on the success of undergraduate students. So we want to research this from a positive perspective, so how time management positively affects the success of undergraduate students. That’s still fairly broad, we can, we can narrow down further.
How Are We Going to Measure Success
For example, what do we mean by success? How are they successful? Or how are we going to measure success? So that leads us to thinking something along the lines of the impact time management has on the likelihood of undergraduate students graduating. Cool, that’s our marker for what we’re researching: undergraduate students graduating.
Final Working Topic
And so at this point, we’ve done our preliminary research, which we would have done on a few working topics, we only showed one for this, the sake of this example, but we’ve narrowed it down to this final working topic. The last thing you want to do is take that working topic and finalize it into an effective researching topic.
Our Final Effective Researching Topic
Essentially, you just want to look at the wording and make sure everything sounds right. So right now we have the impact time management has on the likelihood of undergraduate students graduating. Okay, I know where we’re going with this topic, but we can do a little better. So after fine-tuning it, our final research topic would be something like this: impact proper time management skills have on the graduation rate of undergraduate students. That’s a strong, solid research topic that provides parameters to our research.
Point A and Point B
Remember, topic is point A, point B is after doing your research, so your thesis statement. Your research question is the direction to get you to that thesis statement.
