Refining Research Topics
[You can continue reading the tutorial pages here or you can watch the Topic Development video and continue the tutorial on the next page.]
Effective Research Topics
Once you have a broad idea of what topic you’d like to explore, try developing it further so it’s useful for your specific assignment.
Useful research topics are:
- Exploratory—The research question can’t be answered with a simple “yes,” “no,” or a single fact or number.
- Unbiased—You can have an opinion about your research topic, but your research should not be based on opinion alone. Ask yourself if you can be objective and open-minded about the topic.
- Focused—Not so broad that there’s too much information, but not so narrow that there’s not enough.
Narrowing Down a Topic
Searching for information on a broad topic will give you too many articles, books, or websites. For example, searching for information on social media in a database will give you results about:
- How to use social media
- How to create social media content for businesses
- Government regulation of social media
- Social media usage during COVID-19
- Disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms
- Using social media for data mining
- And more!
To narrow down a topic, try focusing on a specific subtopic, a time period, or a particular group of people. You can also ask yourself questions like who, what, when, where, why, and how to help narrow down your topic.
For example, we could research how social media impacts the mental health of children, teens, or adults. We could also research specific time periods like the last ten years or during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Expanding a Topic
Alternatively, a topic that is too narrowly focused makes it difficult to find enough information for your assignment, because there may not be many articles or books that cover it. If you’re having a hard time finding relevant information, try broadening your topic a little by thinking about its larger context.
For example, researching the impact of TikTok on social anxiety among nursing students at UVU is much too narrow—there will not be enough information about it to support a 6 to 10-page paper.