Choosing a Research Topic
Getting Started
There is no single way to think of a research topic. Sometimes one just comes to you, but often you have to do some brainstorming and initial background research to get an overview of your topic and the issues that are related to it.
Imagine you are taking a General Education course, and your final assignment is to write an essay exploring a topic related to social media. You could start by looking through the course materials provided by your instructor on the course website on D2L or on the internet for information about different issues related to social media. You could also try looking in a reference resource available from MRU Library like The SAGE Handbook of Social Media.
After exploring background information related to this topic, you might decide you are interested in researching social media’s impact on social media users’ mental health.
Different Types of Research Questions
The difference between a research topic and a research question is that a question has more focus and direction. Here are some examples of different types of research questions:
- Causal: (How) does X cause Y?
- Relational: (How) are X and Y related?
- Solution-focused: Can we achieve X by doing Y?
- Comparative: How is X different from Y?
- Exploratory: Is it possible to build X?
- Descriptive: Who or what is X?
For the topic of social media’s impact on users’ mental health, an initial research question could be: What are the impacts of social media use on users’ mental health?
Too Broad or Too Narrow?
It can be challenging to determine if your research question is "just right," meaning that it is neither too broad nor too narrow.
Your topic is too broad when:
- There is too much information to cover in one essay.
- Your work lacks depth and focus.
Your topic is too narrow when:
- Tracking down information takes too much time.
- There is not enough information available on the topic.
As you formulate a research question, know that it may change depending whether you find too much or too little information. The only way to know if your topic is "just right" is to start searching for information.
Here is a helpful video from North Carolina State University Libraries about the importance of picking a properly-scoped topic when doing research entitled Picking Your Topic Is Research!
You start to search for articles about social media’s impact on users’ mental health, but you're finding thousands of results that all talk about different mental health impacts, different social media platforms, and the impacts on different groups of users. You need to narrow your search to make it more manageable for your assignment. Here are some ways you could do that:
- Choose a specific mental health impact, such as impact on self-esteem or addiction.
- Choose a specific social media platform, such as TikTok or Instagram.
- Focus on a specific population of social media users, such as adolescents or the elderly.
Identifying Keywords
To search library databases effectively, you need to identify the most important concepts in your research question, along with any other words or phrases that could be used to describe them. These key terms are what you will use to search for relevant information. A strong, focused research topic usually has about three key concepts.
For our example research question: How does intensity of Instagram use affect self-esteem in adolescents?
The key terms would be Instagram use, self-esteem, and adolescents.
A table like this one can help you identify synonyms and related terms for each concept:
|
Concept |
Instagram use |
self-esteem |
adolescents |
|
Synonyms & related terms |
Instagram posting behaviour social media use |
well-being self-perception self-concept |
teens teenagers |
License
Much of the content on this Academic Research Skills guide has been adapted from the University of Alberta Library, which shared its guide content under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.