Establishing your purpose – research topics
What is this issue?

Why am I interested in it?

Why the reader should be interested in it.

What do “I” say about this issue?

What are your research questions?

Where do you expect to find information?

What words or phrases might be useful for some initial research?

Why is researching this issue important? What do I hope to learn? How will that information make a change?

Establishing the Scope and Context of a Topic
The purpose of this worksheet is to help you determine what research you should focus on when building your paper.

What is your hypothesis?
Source #1

Source #2

Source #3

Source #4

What is the issue of the source? The goal is to figure out the key question that was in the mind of the author when they wrote the article. What was the key question addressed in the article?

What is the most important information in the source? You want to identify the key information the author used, or presupposed, in the article to support their main argument.

What are the main inferences of the article? You want to identify the most important conclusions the author comes to and presents in the article.

What implications come from the article? What consequences are likely to follow if we accept the author’s line of reasoning?

What concepts from the article would be determinative for your hypothesis?

In looking at the above chart, what themes/issues related to your topic do you find being discussed in the literature?
What gaps do you see in the scholarly literature related to your topic?
How can your research proposal address a gap in the scholarly literature? Consider suggestions for future research from the scholarly articles, different settings, different populations, or a different theoretical approach.