GUIDANCE FOR NEW RESEARCHERS
FINDING YOUR RESEARCH TOPIC
Who are you?
You might begin by thinking about your own values and areas of interest relating to a specific disciplinary or social context.
Consider who you are: What are your values? What do you care most about? What inspires you? What gives you energy? Are there any particular new directions, challenges or concerns relating to your disciplinary field that interest you? How might these mesh with a topic that might benefit your future career?
A personal values audit can also be a useful exercise to help you understand better where your interests and energies really lie.
Here is a downloadable Values Audit.
Basic Mind Mapping
If you’re not sure of the area of focus for your research, or have a broad area and need to narrow it down and define its scope, mind mapping can be a useful way of doing this.
You can draw a mind map – sometimes called a spray diagram - on paper, or use post it notes, or create a digital mind map using smart art tools in Word or a platform such as Miro, Mural, or Canva.
Whether you use manual or digital tools, the techniques are the same.
Basic mind mapping techniques
Start by placing your over-arching topic in the centre of the page.
Draw as many lines as you like that run a little way out from this central topic, and place a sub-topic at the end of each. Then draw lines out from each subtopic and draw out any further topics/thoughts/considerations/issues you can think of.
You can keep going until you have exhausted all the possibilities or considerations relating to your overarching topic.
Then examine your mind map – it is likely that your research will focus down onto one small area of this, that enables you to add to understanding of and new knowledge about the topic and to go into sufficient depth with your research – depth is crucial!
Next steps
Then start to read about your topic. Consider:
What has been said about it previously?
Are there any gaps in the knowledge that you might be able to fill through your research?
Has this topic experienced recent changes, perhaps due to new technology or other innovation?
Is it experiencing particular challenges or has even become at risk?
What are the broader considerations you will need to explore to fully understand your topic?
You will need to place your research in context. Will this be socio-cultural, historic, political, environmental, scientific, technological, geographical, demographical?
What trustworthy data is available that will help to place your research accurately in context, for example data on climate change, volumes of textile waste, export data, financial statistics?
What question/s will your research answer or address?
While defining your topic, it is important to ask yourself why it is important, and why now? Why should anyone else be interested in it? This will inform your rationale for the research.
You will need to identify the key thinkers on your topic to date. What conclusions have they drawn from their research? Do others take opposing views?
Don’t just look at the theory that supports your own position. This process helps you to narrow down and define the scope of your research.
Now narrow down your focus, and begin to define any research question/s, your aim and objectives.