From the course: Academic Research Foundations: Quantitative

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Broaden your idea to a research topic

Broaden your idea to a research topic - SPSS Statistics Tutorial

From the course: Academic Research Foundations: Quantitative

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Broaden your idea to a research topic

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- It's rare, but sometimes a research topic is just too narrow. Rather than sitting on top of an idea that can move in many directions, your topic leads you on such a specific path to such a narrow conversation, that there's little for your study to draw from or report on. Sometimes this is because the topic is too new, but more often, it's because the approach is so narrow, it loses its significance. The example of poverty in education is too broad to be a research topic, while the relationship of childhood poverty to higher education graduation rates fits the range of a suitable topic. It gets too narrow when the topic is about how childhood poverty affects graduation rates for sociology majors at four-year universities in central Tennessee. While research on this topic wouldn't be unimportant, the focus is so specific, it would difficult to ground your paper in past research. And even if you were able to pull together data, the scope of the study would be so narrow, it may make…

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