For most students, narrowing down a research topic makes a huge difference between how they carried out the research while in high school and how they should conduct their research projects in college.
Choosing a suitable research topic requires that you work from outside in. Often, you’ll start with a broader topic and narrow it down to a level where you can establish what you’d like to find out rather than only what you’d like to “write about.”
Whether you’ve been given a general topic to investigate, given several problems to study, or you need to come up with your own topic to study, you should ensure that the research problem’s scope underpinning the study isn’t too broad.
To narrow down a specific topic, follow these steps (Để thu hẹp một chủ đề cụ thể, hãy làm theo các bước sau):
1. Choose a general topic area.
2. Give specific description of the topic area.
3. Mention an aspect of the specific topic.
To narrow down a topic’s focus, follow these steps (Để thu hẹp trọng tâm chủ đề, hãy làm theo các bước sau):
1. Note down extra specifics about the topic.
2. Turn the topic into a sentence or statement.
3. Fine-tune your topic’s focus using elements such as time, place, and relationship.
What’s too broad? (Như thế nào gọi là quá rộng?)
College students get tired when an instructor tells them that the topic they chose is too broad. This problem is very common. How do you tell if your topic is too broad?
If you’ve summed up the topic in one or two words, such as education, school cheating, corporal punishment, smoking, or overweight teens, it’s obviously too broad.
If you visit the library and realize you are staring at a whole section of books that you can use as sources for your study topic, then the topic is too broad. A good topic should address a specific problem or question. You should spot from four to five books (or even fewer) on a shelf that can effectively address a specific research problem.
The dangers of not narrowing down (Những mối nguy hại của việc không thu hẹp chủ đề)
If you don’t do that, you’ll find it challenging to handle the study problem on the time and space provided. You might face a couple of issues if you choose to write on a very broad PhD research topic. The issues include:
• Finding tons of sources of information, which makes it difficult to choose what to omit or include, or what’s the most essential.
• Finding generic information that makes it tricky to come up with a clear framework for addressing the research problem
• Lack of adequate parameters to effectively define the research problem makes it challenging to identify and use correct methods required for its analysis.
• You come across information that addresses a wide array of concepts that can’t be included in a single paper. Consequently, you easily get into unnecessary details.
When starting to write a research paper, there’s a common challenge – determining how to narrow down a research topic.
Even if the professor assigns you a specific topic of study, you’ll still be required to narrow it down to some degree. Besides, the professor will find it boring to mark fifty papers talking about the same thing.
That’s why you should narrow your study’s focus early in the writing process. That way, you won’t try to do too much in one research paper.
Source: academichelp.net › general-writing-tips › writing-process
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