Selecting a Research Problem

Ideas

• Just take a few minutes and jot some research ideas you have been carrying around based on your experience.

• Page through recent issues of your favorite, research based, professional journal. Look at the titles of the articles in the journal. You can use the idea of an already published study for a research problem of your own. This is called "replication“.

How else?

• Read Theses in your area and look at the recommendation for further studies.

• Read textbooks and look for open problems.

Activities

• and write down three to five possible research topics.

• Characteristics:• The problem is "researchable" - it is a problem that

can be investigated through the collection and analysis of data.

• The problem has theoretical or practical significance.

• It is a good problem for you.

Review of Literature

• Most important

• Where would you go to get the literature?

• Identify key words to search

• Read abstracts first. Do not refer to the article just based on abstract. Reference should come from the whole article.

• You can keep a citation and key words from abstracts.

Write an outline of “Review of related literature”

• After the outline, read the full articles based on your outline.

Citation styles

• APA: psychology, education, and other social sciences.

• MLA: literature, arts, and humanities. • AMA: medicine, health, and biological

sciences. • Turabian: designed for college students to use

with all subjects. • Chicago: used with all subjects in the "real

world" by books, magazines, newspapers, and other non-scholarly publications.

Next – Formulating Research Hypothesis