Crafting a new topic

What am I doing here?

Esteban Montenegro-Montenegro, PhD

Department of Psychology and Child Development

How to start a new topic?

  • You may be right asking yourself: why do I need to select a research topic? Well, because you are taking a scientific writing course.

  • It is likely that you don’t like the idea of conducting research, and you are less motivated whe you think about working in groups. This is normal, specially if you have a personality that is goal oriented, and you are highly competitive. However, these traits will need to be moderated by the new learning process that this course will offer.

  • And I hope you enjoy this new experience!

How to start a new topic?

  • Frequently, the search for a new topic will start with general ideas, and perhaps personal experience will guide your senses on what topic is more appealing.

  • Sometimes a problem that is frequent in your enviroment will also drive your ideas. For example, social inequality, or discrimination.

  • Nowadays, I have found a lot of students interested in social media use, social media consequences, and social media impact in daily life. This is not random, social media is for example a technological advancement that has shaped how people interact and interpret the world. It has impacted, for instance the result of elections in USA and other countries.

How to start a new topic?

  • Let’s try an example. We can imagine a scenario where you have a vague idea:

    • “I’m interested on the effects of social media”

  • This is a good start, but should we add an additional claim?

flowchart LR
  A[Effects of social media] --> B(Claim) --> C[on emotion regulation]

  • We just added a new “claim” that states a possible impact of social media on emotion regulation. This is at the same time a little bit more specific. But there is more work to do.

Start asking questions…

  • Questions are the most important part of any scientific
    • You may start with questions starting with:
      • Who?
      • What?
      • When?
      • Where?
      • Why?
  • You can generate as many questions as you need in early stages of your design:

Tip

  • How is the process of social media and emotion regulation?
  • Why social media is related to emotion regulation?
  • When social media and emotion regulation are related?
  • What is the relationship between social media and emotion regulation?
  • Where is social media related to emotion regulation?

Time to play a game…

You may participate by clicking here.

Evaluate your questions

  • It is good to create as many questions as possible in early stages of your study design but not all questions are feasible to the answered in this course or in your master thesis.

    • For example, how does mother-child interaction affect the attachment style in the context of life goals at 15 years of age and 50 years of age?

  • We need evaluate what questions are possible to answer with the time and resources you have at hand. Additionally you need to think what variables are you adding to your question.

So what? Why your question matters?

Booth et al. (2009):

  • After selecting your research question or your best set of research questions you will need to ask to yourself:
    • What will be lost if you don’t answer your question?
    • How will not answering it keep us from understanding something else better than we do? Start by asking So what? at first of yourself.

Adding inderect questions

Booth et al. (2009):

  1. I am studying social media and emotion regulation…
  • because I want to find why people engage for many hours on social media,
  • in order to help my audience understand the negative and positive effects of social media on emotion regulation and mental health.

As Booth et al. (2009) mentioned in their book, this type of sub-question helps to focus on a specific message, for a precise audience. This might also help you to shape the tone and the words you select.

All this will lead you to write your main aim

  1. What you are studying -I am working on the topic of …
    1. what you don’t know about it -because I want to find out …
      1. why you want your audience to know and care about it -in order to help my audience understand better

References

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Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., & Williams, J. M. (2009). The craft of research. University of Chicago press.