A common challenge when beginning to write a research paper is determining how and in what ways to narrow down your topic. Even if your professor gives you a specific topic to study, it will always be general enough that you can narrow it down even further and investigate certain aspects that appeal specifically to you. This helps keep your topic original and interesting to you.
A topic is too broad to be manageable when a review of the literature reveals too many different, and oftentimes conflicting or only remotely related, ideas about how to investigate the research problem. Although you will want to start the writing process by considering a variety of different approaches to studying the research problem, you will need to narrow the focus of your investigation at some point early in the writing process. This way, you don't attempt to do too much in one paper.
Here are some strategies to help narrow the thematic focus of your paper:
- Aspect -- choose one lens through which to view the research problem, or look at just one facet of it [e.g., rather than studying the role of food in South Asian religious rituals, study the role of food in Buddhist marriage ceremonies, or, the role of one particular type of food among several religions].
- Components -- determine if your initial variable or unit of analysis can be broken into smaller parts, which can then be analyzed more precisely [e.g., a study of drug use among adolescents can focus on just cigarettes rather than all forms of usage or, rather than adolescents in general, focus on female adolescents in a certain age range who choose to use tobacco].
- Methodology -- the way in which you gather information can reduce the domain of interpretive analysis needed to address the research problem [e.g., a single case study can be designed to generate data that does not require as extensive an explanation as using multiple cases].
- Place -- generally, the smaller the geographic unit of analysis, the more narrow the focus [e.g., rather than study race relations issues in North America, study race relations issues in the United States or even in the American South as a case study that helps to explain or bring to light problems in a specific region].
- Relationship -- ask yourself how do two or more different perspectives or variables relate to one another. Designing a study around the relationships between specific variables can help constrict the scope of analysis [e.g., cause/effect, compare/contrast, contemporary/historical, group/individual, child/adult, opinion/reason, problem/solution].
- Time -- the shorter the time period of the study, the more narrow the focus [e.g., restricting the study of trade relations between the United States and Russia/Soviet Union to only the period of 1981 - 1991].
- Type -- focus your topic in terms of a specific type or class of people, places, or phenomena [e.g., a study of developing safer traffic patterns near schools can focus on SUVs, or just student drivers, or just the timing of traffic signals in the area].
- Combination -- use two or more of the above strategies to focus your topic more narrowly.
Apply one of the above strategies first in designing your study to determine if that gives you a manageable research problem to investigate. You will know if the problem is manageable by reviewing the literature on your more narrowed problem and assessing whether prior research is sufficient to move forward in your study [i.e., not too much, not too little]. Be careful, however, because combining multiple strategies risks creating the opposite problem--your problem becomes too narrowly defined and you can't locate enough research or data to support your study.
Booth, Wayne C. The Craft of Research. Fourth edition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2016
