Senior Sequence

 
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Selecting a Topic (7 Steps)

Seven Steps to Selecting a Research Topic

The following guide—seven steps to choose a research topic—is adapted from a handout that Professor Peter Marris put together for his urban planning students at UCLA.

ARCHIVE OF EXEMPLARY WORK by Senior Sequence Students
Examples of Abstracts, Proposals and SRPs

Step 1.

Begin by deciding what general issues concern you the most, e.g., the environment, poverty, health care delivery, planning, crime, housing, education, immigration, welfare policy, economic restructuring, or whatever. Note: The Senior Sequence Grand Challenges Database and list of Research Opportunities on this web site is a good place to shop for ideas.

You can also browse around some excellent on-line Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Knowledge Maps to explore concepts.
On-line encyclopedias, dictionaries, and various graphical-user-interfaces (GUIs) for viewing semantic relationships among words/concepts (i.e., infocartography), are very useful for positioning oneself in the world of ideas and discourse. Here I mention just three. The first one in particular is worth exploring.

  1. ScienceDirect (online)—-International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
  2. Oxford Reference Online

UCSD just released a new Undergraduate Research Portal with lots of good information, guides and opportunities, see http://urp.ucsd.edu/

Cheat Sheet for USP Senior Sequence Library Research
Library’s Homepage: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/
RefWorks is your friend! http://www.refworks.com/Refworks

UCSD Urban Studies Research Guide: http://ucsd.libguides.com/usp
This guide was created with general Urban Studies research in mind. It covers basic resources and gives tips for how to get started with your research.

USP Senior Sequence Research Guide: http://ucsd.libguides.com/seniorsequence
This guide was created especially for *you* and includes resources for each Area of Concentration. It is not exhaustive, but it goes a step beyond the basic resources to provide you with more specific databases, books and web resources. Remember that all the Areas of Concentration are inter-related and you might find useful resources in areas other than your own, especially if you have chosen a very interdisciplinary topic.

Ask an expert at UCSD
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/facultyexperts/
Other links to guide you to experts and specialists in your area of concentration (click here )

Find an expert in science UC system-wide
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/Science_Experts/

Step 2

Among the general issues that concern you the most, some will engage your attention more than others—not necessarily because you think they are more important, but because you can relate them more vividly to your own experience. This is fine. Indeed, as the great sociologist C.W. Mills (1959: 195) says…“the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community do not split their work from their lives.” It may help if you think of your assignments as more than an academic task; like I suggested above, use them as an opportunity to explore your deep interests (career or otherwise).

Step 3

Once you have a topic that engages you, try to figure out what you most want to ask about it. What is it about poverty, about community economic development, inequality, industrial ecology, regional planning, class conflict, racism, social movements, NGO networking, or whatever, that you want to understand or prove? The questions you raise can take many forms, and lead to distinct types of research: what really happened? How can we change this? Why did it happen? What’s going to happen next? How can we make people understand? Is it true that…? How can I prove that…?

To develop critical thinking skills, UCSD’s “successful learner” program instructs students to raise questions spanning four levels. You may find this useful:

  1. The first level of questions concern verifiable matters such as definitions, frequencies, magnitudes, and other hard data (what, where, when, sometimes why).
  2. A second level of questions develop as one explores more complex matters, those which detail relationships (comparisons, explanations, discussions, disagreements, agreements, solutions, predictions, structures, processes and functions).
  3. Level three questions alter the assumptions previously accepted and imagines different scenarios in which the relationships can be redefined or changed.
  4. Level four calls for critical judgment and choice. Raising questions at all four levels moves one from the realm of common sense to critical thinking. As Andrew Sayer (1993) points out, in the study of any subject common sense thinking is thinking with your values, beliefs, expectations. Critical thinking is also thinking about your values, beliefs, expectations.

Step 4

When you have found a question, or set of questions, begin to think about what you might be able to do, as a piece of research, that could provide some insight into them. Research can set out to confirm hypotheses, or to analyze and interpret in more open and less predetermined ways a history, the life of a community, a set of relationships. It may be more exploring than confirming, may attempt interpretive understanding rather than rigorous proof.

Step 5

As you begin to think about the possible research that would throw light on your general topic, you will probably find that the questions you want to answer are far broader and more far ranging than any particular piece of research can answer. The challenge at this point is to reduce the scope of your study to a manageable task, without it becoming so limited that it no longer seems able to provide an exciting understanding of what concerns you. You can consider several different strategies for resolving this dilemma:

a) Study a part that seems to represent the whole: study one inner city neighborhood—even a block within a neighborhood—to understand inner city life. Study representative leaders of a movement, to understand its history. Study a particular case of a bureaucracy undergoing change, an instance of policy-making, the experience of a few undocumented workers. And so on. The attraction of this strategy is that you can explore the richness of the whole topic in microcosm. The drawback is that you cannot be sure how well or fully what you have studied represents the whole.

b) Organize the crucial questions in an order of priority, so that your research, even if it is very limited, is an important first step. For example, before asking questions about the causes of poverty, we should know who the poor are; before we try to explain why environmental problems are more serious in one section of the city than another, we should know how these problems are defined and how data about them are (or are not) collected.

c) Set your research in the context of previous research, so that the new material you gather will help to confirm or refute an existing framework of explanation, and so have wider implications.

d) Make use of existing data and analyze it in ways which others are not attempting. This may enable you to work with a much larger and more comprehensive data base than you would have time or money to prepare for yourself.

e) Interview people who are already knowledgeable about your topic and read the available literature, so that you gain, at second hand, a comprehensive understanding. This is characteristically what journalists do, and the best journalism can be more insightful than much academic research. But, by itself, this way of understanding issues does not enable you to make an original contribution unless, perhaps, the analysis of current opinion is itself your theme. Then the interviews may be first hand data for research in the sociology of knowledge.

f) Don’t make the mistake of attempting to master all the relevant theories, methods and literature before defining your particular topic and research design. First define the study, and then seek the specific methods and writings most useful to your study.

Narrative devices offer another useful way to think about organizing your thoughts/approach.  See the writing tips page for more details: Concepts_and_Theories.pdf

Step 6

Once you have reduced the scale of the research to a manageable size you need to choose the methods. Marshall and Rossman (1995:41) provide many pointers to help you match research questions with strategy. Basically, there are six ways of finding out about behavior: (1) ASK, (2) READ, (3) OBSERVE, (4) INFER, (5) EXPERIMENT, and (6) IMAGINE.Step 6

Once you have reduced the scale of the research to a manageable size you need to choose the methods. Marshall and Rossman (1995:41) provide many pointers to help you match research questions with strategy. Basically, there are six ways of finding out about behavior: (1) ASK, (2) READ, (3) OBSERVE, (4) INFER, (5) EXPERIMENT, and (6) IMAGINE.

1. You can ask people—about their own and others’ behavior

2. You can read—examine written records

3. You can observe others as well as your own behavior

4. You can infer behavior from other information or observations

5. You can imagine behavior and explore its possibilities

6. You can experiment

Obviously, it is impossible for any one course to adequately cover all six “ways of finding out about behavior.” The USP senior sequence focuses on qualitative methods. The core methods for gathering information in qualitative research include: “(1) participation in the setting, (2) direct observation, (3) in-depth interviewing, and (4) document review” ( Marshall and Rossman 1994:78).

Step 7

Now that you have in mind a piece of research that is interesting, important, manageable in scale, and can be done using some combination of the methods noted above, the final questions are practical: How do I find the time and resources to do what I want? Try to conserve your energy and resources by linking your proposal, SRP, internship, possible honors thesis, and career interests. For example, do a case study of the institution that agrees es to take you on as an intern, or evaluate a plan that your internship placement has you working on. From another angle, you may want to try and actually raise funds for your research. There are sources available for undergraduates.

To give you some ideas, check out the “Community of Science” <http://www.cos.com> website. The COS has a searchable database of funding opportunities, funded research, and funding news. COS contains comprehensive information on grants searchable by topic, researcher name, performing institution, and geographical area. And remember, its crucial to talk with people along the way.