In this tutorial, we will identify what makes for a successful research topic.
Most research topics start out as a general and often vague idea that a researcher has an interest in investigating.
Inexperienced researchers, including most doctoral learners, frequently think of topics that are quite interesting, but not narrowly enough focused for a dissertation.
This tutorial will guide you through a set of steps designed to help you come up with a topic, first of all, and secondly to focus it more tightly so that you can begin a meaningful and successful search of the existing literature to discover whether your topic is actually researchable.
This tutorial's primary objective is to prepare you to create a successful research topic that may become the topic of your dissertation. To do that, we'll work through the following issues:
Obviously, in Track 1 you are at the beginning of your studies toward the doctorate, and perhaps your dissertation is far from your thoughts. We are starting the process now, however, because our experience has been that when learners wait to start searching for their topics, it often creates a serious problem for them when they actually start the dissertation. That problem can take many forms, but the most common one is that they have not had sufficient time (and training) in exhaustively searching the relevant literature to discover whether the topic they are interested in is even viable—and without a good topic statement, a good literature search is impossible. So let's begin.
A research topic is an area of interest to a researcher that is first of all, researchable. It is focused narrowly enough that its key concepts are quite plain and well integrated. It is a topic or subject that can be found in the existing literature of the researcher's field, which shows that it is of some interest or importance to that field, and has some important characteristics.
The first mark of a well-formed topic is that it clearly states the key concepts to be investigated. Sometimes, only one concept is named—those studies often turn out to be qualitative, but not always. More often, two or more key concepts are named. Next, it identifies the relationship or relationships among those concepts that the researcher intends to explore. Obviously, if only one concept was named, there won't be a relationship, but in that case a word like "describes" or "experiences" will give a clue to the kind of information desired. Third, a research topic specifies the population of interest to be investigated. Finally, a research topic is just a phrase. That is, it is not a full sentence with a verb. However, the well-formed topic statement will embed the actual topic in a complete sentence. Let's look at some examples.
Here are a few topic statements that eventually lead to successful dissertations:
You can see immediately that all six examples, taken from the four schools in Capella University, are phrases, not complete sentences. So far, so good. The first mark of a successful topic statement is that it identifies the key concepts to be investigated, right? Let's see how the examples do that.
In the first example, we seem to have two key concepts: "needs" and "family-based counseling services." Are they stated clearly? Probably not clearly enough: what is meant by "needs" and "family-based counseling services" is not immediately transparent. This topic will need some work, but most topics start out this way.
Let's try another: Indigenous people’s responses to encounters with law enforcement. Here, there seem to be two key concepts: "responses" and "encounters with law enforcement." These concepts are quite broad and will have to be narrowed considerably to support a researchable topic, but they provide a good start.
Let's do one more: Employees' productivity as a function of their managers' management styles.
Here, there are two key concepts, right? Productivity and management styles.
The second mark of a successful topic is that it identifies any relationship to be investigated between or among the key concepts. Let's look at the third example to see about this.
This topic meets our criterion of being a phrase. It seems to state at least two concepts (but with multiple levels): "death" and "socio-economic status of daughters." What about the relationship? Well, it is captured in that word "impact."
An "impact" in research jargon means the effect that one concept—death—has on another concept, in this case, the daughters. One can, in fact, replace the word impact with the word effect without changing the meaning at all. So the topic is proposing a cause-and-effect kind of relationship.
Let's look at another example: The relationship between assignment strategies to prevent burnout used by managers of first responders and the occurrence of burnout
This seems complicated, but it really isn't. First, let's check the key concepts: "Assignment strategies to prevent burnout" would seem to be one key concept, and "occurrence of burnout" would be the other. These are reasonably clear, or probably would be to someone in the human resources or management worlds. No doubt they will be further clarified as the researcher works on the topic's wording. But what about the relationship? It is in the word "relationship," obviously. And in research jargon, a "relationship" between A and B is a particular kind of relationship, called a correlation.
Now, play with the other topics to see if you can identify the relationship—if any.
The third sign of a successful topic is that it names the target population, the group of people or organizations or groups that the researcher is interested in. Let's evaluate some of our examples on this point.
The population is managers of first responders. Or is it? The awkward wording of the topic makes this a bit hard to digest. The burnout occurs in the first responders, so maybe they are the population. But the first responders' managers are the ones using the management strategies, so are they the population?
Well, the two key concepts are management strategies (used by managers) and rate of burnout (in first responders), so the researcher will have to get information from both groups of people, so both are the target population: first responders and their managers.
Take a minute and try to figure out the rest of our examples.
We've seen in action the three chief marks of a successful research topic.
A well-formed research topic will have these characteristics, but simply having them is not sufficient. The elements also need to be well-focused and narrowed down to a point where the research becomes feasible. Let's take a look at a simple method for doing this.
| Broad Term | Narrower Term | Even More Narrow Term |
|---|---|---|
| Indigenous people |
Native Americans |
Cherokee Indians |
| Law enforcement |
Police |
Traffic officers |
Responses |
Emotional responses |
Tolerance for stress |
Take a look at this grid. You'll see that one of our topics has been broken out into the first column. The population is first—indigenous people—followed by two concepts: responses and law enforcement. Now look at the central column, labeled "Narrower term." Notice how the very broad population has been narrowed. Similarly, "law enforcement" has been narrowed to police (there are many other types of law enforcement, such as FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, Customs and Immigration, sheriff's departments, and so on). Similarly, there are many kinds of behaviors and experiences that could be considered "responses," but the researcher is most interested in emotional responses. Now move to the third column. Can you see how each term is being narrowed yet again?
If we restated the topic now, after having narrowed it down a bit, it would look like this: Cherokee Indians' tolerance for stress when meeting traffic officers.
Let's work through another example, this time using the topic "Employees' productivity as a function of their managers' management styles."
| Broad Term | Narrower Term | Even More Narrow Term |
|---|---|---|
| Employees and managers | ||
| Productivity | ||
| Management style |
You can see the key terms lined up in the first column. The other two columns are blank.
What would you ask yourself, if this were your topic, in order to narrow this down?
There are many questions you can ask yourself when you are narrowing your topic. A good opener is "So what do I really want to know about the concept?"
Another quite good question is to ask about your real interest or passion is about the concept or the population.
You can also find helpful terms by performing controlled vocabulary searches in library databases. You can find a nice tutorial on that method of searching in the Capella library at but whatever you ask yourself, keep your focus on what you truly most want to know and care about regarding the concept.
Now, let's get back to our example.
| Broad Term | Narrower Term | Even More Narrow Term |
|---|---|---|
| Employees and managers |
Service employees and managers |
Call center personnel |
| Productivity |
Days at work |
Calls completed times minutes per call |
| Management style |
Authoritarian management style |
Authoritarian versus flexible management style |
When the researcher asked herself what sort of employees and managers she was actually interested in, she realized it was service employees and managers. The more she pondered, and was helped by a quick check of the literature in her specialization, she realized that she was most interested in call center personnel. Then she tackled productivity. From her courses in management measurement, she knew that one way to think about productivity was days at work. But that seemed too dependent on factors outside the manager-employee relationship. She wanted a more fine-grained way to look at productivity, so she narrowed it to a specific measure, calls completed times minutes per call.
Then she took on management style. Knowing that there are many types, her first attempt at focusing this term was authoritarian style. That didn't satisfy her, and when she looked again at her topic, she realized that that word "function" was important. It implied to her that she was really interested in knowing how different management styles related to different degrees of productivity. At first, she put together a list of known management styles, but that felt intimidating. She decided to narrow it down to just two: authoritarian vs. flexible management style.
After all this, her topic now looked like this: Productivity as measured by calls completed times minutes per call in call center employees supervised by authoritarian managers compared to productivity in call center employees supervised by flexible managers.
She knew the wording was clunky and would need to be crafted better, but she had a much more focused topic. So far, we've been looking at two things about good research topics: what they should contain (concepts, relationships, and population), and how to narrow each element. In these narrowing exercises, we've focused on the concepts and the population. Now, let's turn our attention to the relationship. This is a very important element, because it offers an important clue about the nature of the study that might ensue.
Research asks all kinds of questions, and the relationship named in the research topic clues us into what kind of question the ensuing study will likely ask. Here are some questions you might ask in order to choose the right word to describe the relationship you're looking for.
What do you envision really doing?
For each of these (and there are other sorts of questions you can ask yourself), specific words can specify the relationship. Let's look at them.
If your topic compares two or more things compared with or some similar phrase indicates the relationship you want to know about. For instance, student retention rates in large urban school districts compared with small rural districts.
If your interest is about relationships between two or more concepts, try using words like relationship, in relation to, or other similar constructions. Here's an example: the frequency of church attendance in relation to socioeconomic status.
Suppose your interest is to see if one thing has an effect on something else. In that case, you can use that word, effect, or other words such as influence, impact, cause, predict, and the like. For example, the influence of tax policy on employment patterns in Midwestern communities.
An outcome is another version of a cause-and-effect relationship, specifically when you are interested in the final condition after some kind of process. For instance, the outcome of a training program. That word is excellent to use for the relationship, as in the outcome of training program A as measured by employee comprehension of corporate policies.
Are you interested in describing a certain experience, such as falling in love or being laid off work or having a baby or starting a new company? Having experiences is a very subjective thing, and the actual experience is a single thing—not one of a few variables. So there is no relationship to specify in such a topic, but the only way to learn about people's experiences is to ask them to describe them. So, words like descriptions of, accounts of, reports of, and the like can be very helpful. For instance, men's descriptions of their spiritual transformations when recovering from alcoholism.
Okay, we've covered the basics of how to craft a well-formed research topic. We've seen the marks of a good topic. They are:
In a minute, you'll get to work crafting your own research topic, but first I want to show you why we emphasize the importance of narrowing and focusing the key concepts, relationships, and populations.
The research topic is step 1 in the sequential process of research design. Once you have your topic in hand, step 2 is to take it to the library and begin searching for existing research and theory on the topic. Here's where your key concepts need to be well-defined and narrowly focused. You will be looking for all the existing research on those key concepts when you start.
At first, you'll investigate each of your key concepts individually, to find out what the existing literature has to say about them in and of themselves. Later, after you have developed a good working knowledge of the background concepts, you'll dig deeper into research linking the key concepts together.
At the third level, you'll follow the "breadcrumbs" all the way back to the earliest studies on your topic so that you will, ultimately, master that literature fully.
So your topic statement is the foundation. It organizes your various literature reviews. Searching on the key concepts (translated into various key words) will help you organize the content of your study.
Searching on the existing methodological literature about the relationship named in your topic will prepare you for your methodological decisions in later steps of research design.
There is an old Chinese proverb found in the I Ching and many other places: “Patience in the beginning brings success.” If you are careful and attentive, and work patiently to write your research topic, then rewrite it, then rewrite it again and again, you will have a solid foundation on which to start building your literature review. The topic is your beginning.
Remain patient and steady, and you will succeed.
Doc. reference: phd_t1_u04s1_mpsuccess.html