Wednesday, October 16, 2013

How to Choose Good Topics for Research Paper

Reasearch Design Methods Have you ever been given a task to conduct a research study by your teacher? Did you feel desperate because you did not have any good topics for your research essay or research paper? This situation often happens to us, especially for students in the final year. Usually, there are two conditions we face when we have any assignments about a research. First, our teacher gives us the topics we can choose for our research project. Second, we have to start from zero which means we have to find the topics by ourselves.

By this course, we will learn about how to choose a good topics for any research projects. This course offers you some tips that you can follow in order to help you find a good topic. Please read carefully each step below, and good luck!

1. Understanding the assignment.
First, in choosing research topics, select the topics according to what assigned to us. If we get a task to conduct research on aids, thus we should not make the title of our study "Consumer Perceptions to the Computers Made in China" – which maybe more suitable for IT research. Understanding the task will make us specify the topic. For example, we have an assignment to examine the impact of internet use, then we can choose some specific topics either "The benefits of the Internet for teaching system in the village of X" or "The Effect of the Internet on the Interests of Children to Play Outside", and so on.

2. Choose topics that interest you or may intereset your audiences.
From the list of topics given (if any) we choose a topic that interesting to us. Why? Because humans are naturally curious creatures. Each person will have different interests. If we conduct a research on things we like, it will boost us to do the research. But if we can not choose based on what we interest, we can choose a topic that might be interesting for our audiences.

3. Is it containing rich literature?
New topics and have not many observed would have a better value for our research because we can add the literature by our research. However, it will make us work harder, especially for writing our research’s background because we only have limited theories about the topics. More limited literature we have, more time we will spend.

4. What do you know?
This statement means we need to master our topics because it will help us conduct our research project more sistematically.

5. Is it relevant enough?
We can choose a topic that relevant to us, although it is not a must. For instance, if we were a student in faculty of social health, we can choose any topics about health or medicines. It will help us to apply our research in the real life.

6. (More) Reading and Discussing
When we are in the zero condition – having no idea to start our researches, we could find inspiration by doing brainstorming with friends or reading any materials in the library. Newspaper or magazine (both printed and online) are good sources to get hot issues and interesting topics.

The thing you need to know about good topics for your research
According to some literatures, good topics should be neither too wide nor too narrow. Too wide topics enable you to tell a lot of things but just on the basic knowledge. However, too narrow topics will limit your research, and for further impact it will restrict information you want to share with your audiences. Good topics are those spesific enough and let you give deep understanding to your audiences.

For additional information, our research title will be derived from our topic. A good research’s title should be complete, which contains research’s object, subject and variables, and provides a clear overview about the research.

To help you with your research, here are some interesting topics you can consider:

A. Topics on Accounting
  • Good Corporate Governance

  • Real and Accrual-based Management and its legal consequencies
B. Topics on Marketing

  • Demarketing unrenewable products

  • Green marketing

  • Social marketing

  • Ethical marketing

  • Female consumers
C. Topics on Sociology
  • Abortion

  • Absolute poverty – the causes and how to remove it.

  • Child labor

  • Capitalism vs socialism

  • Culture

  • Consumerism, etc.
D. Topics on psychology
  • Antisocial personality disorder

  • Attention span

  • Attitude

  • Bulliying

  • Child abuse

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