The topic for any research project should be one of personal interest to ensure continuous momentum throughout.

Your topic needs to be broad enough to support a long project but focused enough to be manageable.

You can narrow the focus by concentrating on people, settings, products, policies, time-frames or genre.

If you are not already familiar with your topic, do some background reading first.

• What are the main elements?
• Are there known contentious aspects or talking points?
• How much coverage of the topic already exists?
• Who are the principal people involved, e.g. those driving developmental change?
• Are there specific aspects that you would like to explore further?

Your topic is likely to include multiple, possibly interlinked, elements. Using a mind map or similar tool to plan your content will help you to focus your question.

Once you know your overall topic, you will be refining this into a specific research question.

This may be one of the next steps or will follow your literature review, depending on the level of study and nature of the project.

Once you know or have mind-mapped your topic, you will want to formulate a question. This may be a working hypothesis or a set question depending on your assignment.

There are several tools available to help you formulate a robust question.

Tools for:

• Quantitative studies:
  • PICO, and its variants - PIO; PICOT; PICOS
  • FINER
• Qualitative studies:
  • PEO
  • SPIDER
  • SPICE
  • ECLIPSE
• Mixed methods studies:
  • SPIDER
  • FINER

Using one of these tools is regarded as standard practice in some subject disciplines, e.g. nursing and healthcare.

You can find out more about these tools and how to use them in our research questions guide.