Narrow Your Topic
It's very common to select a topic that's too broad. When the scope of your topic is too big, it's hard to dig through the huge volume of information available to find something relevant. It's also hard to write a paper or give a presentation of with any depth. Most scholarly research examines fairly narrow topics and looks at relationships between concepts. For example, affirmative action is a huge topic, but looking at the relationship between affirmative action and self esteem might be a more manageable topic.
There are many ways to narrow a topic that is too broad. Let's use affirmative action as an example:
- affirmative action and the law (what)
- affirmative action and self esteem (what)
- affirmative action and the military (what)
- affirmative action and medical education (what)
- affirmative action in California (where)
- affirmative action and women (who)
- affirmative action and latinos (who)
- affirmative action and blacks (who)
- affirmative action in the 1970s (when)
Use these concepts develop a research question on the topic of affirmative action:
- Has affirmative action changed medical education for women?
- Have latinos in California benefitted from affirmative action?
- Are there more high ranking black officers in the military because of affirmative action?
Broaden Your Topic
It is possible to generate a topic that's too narrow. When the scope of your topic is too small, there may not be enough information available for your paper or presentation. For example, this affirmative action-related topic is probably too narrow:
Did affirmative action policies benefit medical education opportunities for women from Atwater, California in the 1970's.
To find enough information, you might need to broaden the who (change women to minorities) and the where (change Atwater to California) concepts in this question. You might also need to omit the limited time frame.
Here are a few more examples of narrowing a broad topic down to a manageable topic one step at a time.
- political correctness > political correctness and universities > Are universities equally tolerant to politically correct and politically incorrect viewpoints?
- social media > social media and bullying > The effect of social media on bullying behaviors among U.S. teenagers
- academic freedom > academic freedom and politic* > Does academic freedom exist on both sides of the political aisle?