Understanding Research Read Online Free

or concept unexplored or there may be research that led to inconsistent results; your research proposes to address these anomalous findings. This is where youcan use your research project as an opportunity to be creative – this is a sort of originality as well.
    **TIP: If the research topic is too speculative or considered too ‘left field’ in your setting, you may find it difficult to find an appropriate supervisor to support your research.
So, along with striving to be creative and independent some compromise may be necessary.
Be inclusive but be realistic. You should really enjoy the subject and want to spend a significant portion of your time on it.
    At the end of the day, though, you do need to settle on a main theme; what you do decide to do need not take on hugely life-long implications. This need not be your life’s work. Agonizing too long over which topic on the basis that this will define you intellectually, confine you in your future options, or must be directly applicable to your future career ambitions is often misplaced, particularly at the undergraduate and master level. 7
    For Ph.D.s these questions can take on a larger personal or professional dimension. But even then I would argue that academic careers are not necessarily made or broken on the one research topic, or methodology for that matter. Right now, decisions need to be made. Furthermore, many such concerns get ironed out; even early on in the design stages we need to enrol, enthuse, ‘pitch’ the idea, get it out of our heads and onto paper where sympathetic and sceptical listener/s, experts and lay audiences can get a handle on it and challenge us to improve.
    From the general to the particular
    This shift is not a straightforward one; any new research project shuffles between our own ‘grand designs’, our view of precursors in the research literature as inspirations or competitors, and the need to knock a topic or an idea into the shape of a so-called doable research question. All researchers are looking to find ‘the puzzle and gaps’ in a particular area. 8 For this reason:
making notes and committing your earliest ideas in writing is indispensable to moving you along (see Creswell 2009: 78–82); an often overlooked role of research proposal-writing ( Chapter 3 );
as is breaking down topics arising from your studies and reading, or dissertation projects from students in previous years.
    For example, which of the topics below, all taken from the initial ideas of eventually completed research, are more general? Which are more specific? How could you make some of the broader topics into more focused questions?
‘body-building’
‘the anti-sweatshop movement and globalization’
‘political blogs and democracy’
‘gender and voting behaviour’
‘anti-immigration policies in the European Union’
‘states and markets after the Credit Crisis’
‘young women and urban violence’
‘popular culture and world politics’
‘multilateral institutions and new social movements’
‘actor-networks and social activism on the web’.
    Once you have decided on the subject-area, or areas you are interested in, your research topic usually boils down to one sentence or phrase. This can designate both a general rubric, sub-themes and ideally (for supervisory meetings especially) a specific issue. So, if you look at the above examples again, and you can see that they point to any number of more specific questions, you could ask which can be broken down into sub-topics and how you would go about breaking them down (e.g. by geography, periods of time, groups around gender or ethnicity, older or newer media).
    ** TIP: If you want to do something that is counter-intuitive or against the grain in a field, then the ‘burden of proof’ is greater.
Note that listeners will voice reservations quite quickly if a research topic is unusual, too narrow, or too broad.
That said, most research starts out as topics that are too broad. So if you get this