Focusing on a Topic
Once you feel comfortable with your level of background knowledge, it's time to restrict your focus to specific issues that you wish to explore in depth. Go over your notes and select an issue or set of issues on which you want to concentrate your efforts. Some of the possible approaches are:
- Explore the impact of one event or phenomenon on another.
- Select a controversy and examine both sides.
- Choose contrasting situations and investigate the differences.
You can also place limits on the scope of your project, in order to make it more manageable. Some of the more common limitations are:
- Time period
- Geographic area
- Population
- species
- gender
- group membership (age, ethnic, physical, racial, social, etc)
- Genre or style
Use these approaches to help you define an area of research that can be covered thoroughly in the time and space allotted to your paper. Don't overdo it, though. You want to be sure that your topic has been the subject of previous research.
Getting specific
There are five important points to consider about your topic at this time:
- It must be of interest to you. You will be spending a lot of time working on this project, so choose something in which you can invest yourself.
- Don't make it too broad. It is important to restrict the focus of your project to a topic that you can cover adequately in the time and space allowed. A topic such as "families" or "AIDS" is much too broad. Consider what particular aspects of the topic interest you. Do you want to learn more about families on welfare? AIDS and teenagers? Go over your background material again and choose an issue that concerns you.
- Don't make it too narrow. If you were planning to write about "the impact of alcohol abuse on Malaysian families in Massachusetts in 1978," you might need to reconsider. By placing so many restrictions on your search (time, location, ethnic group), you would have made it difficult to find a sufficient number of information sources to write an acceptable paper. You could still use the idea (impact of alcohol abuse), but look for ways to expand the scope of the project to something about which there is previous research.
- Be cautious about rhetorical questions. Attempting to answer questions that don't have answers such as "Are traditional families best?" or "Is there life on other planets?" will consume more time and energy than you have available for a typical research paper.
- Your research should examine relationships. You should be able to identify at least two key concepts for your topic. You should be exploring the connections between them.
Leslie Murtha, 19 December 2000