Human Development and Family Science

Narrowing a topic requires you to be more specific about your research interest and can help you to develop a thesis.

Questions to Narrow Your Topic

• Who? Who is the specific person/group to which you would like to limit your research?
• What? What specific aspect of the broad topic idea is interesting to you?
• Where? To which specific geographic area or region would you like to limit your research?
• When? On what time period would you like your research focused?
• Why? Why do you think this is an important/interesting topic?

For more help, watch the Developing Research Topics and Research questions video.

Before you look for articles, you should determine what your topic is and identify keywords and phrases.

State your topic as a question: "How does parenting style affect adolescent development of independence?"

• identify the keywords/phrases: 
  • "parenting style",  "adolescent development",  "independence"
• brainstorm for synonyms for the concepts: 
  • Parenting Style:  Democratic parenting, permissive parenting, authoritarian parenting
  • Adolescent Development:  Physical development, cognitive development, social/emotional development
  • Independence:  Autonomy, self-sufficiency, competence

Once you have identified keywords and phrases and synonyms, you are ready to formulate searches.

For the example topic, you might search for:

("parent* style"  OR "democratic parenting") AND ("Adolescent development" OR "cognitive development") AND (autonomy OR competence)

If you don't find anything with that search, then you may want to think of adding some synonyms to your search:

NOTE: 

• The asterisk "*" tells the databases you will take forms of the word: Parent* = parent, parents, parenting, parental
• The parentheses "( )" tell the database you that you want anything in those parenthesis and anything in the other set of parentheses

For more information on searching, watch the Library Database Search Strategies video.