Elsevier S & T ©1. ey idea.Cross out any words or phrases that can be removed without changing themeaning.Reduce your remaining draft to three sentences.Be sure your final three sentences identify the subject (What are youstudying?), perspective (How are you looking at it?), and vantage point(What academic field will you use?).2. What contributions to the field make this research important?3. What are your beliefs, values, biases, and opinions?How will these beliefs, values, biases, and opinions help you in conductingyour research?How will you prevent the tendencies contained in your personal viewpointfrom affecting the necessary neutral stance of a researcher?Now, using your answers for Questions 1 through 3, write a statement that clearlydefines the interest for your research work, a statement that defines the significance ofyour research, and a statement that defines your personal tendencies and how you willcontrol them. When completed, you will have a researchable interest.TASK 3. USE THE RESEARCH INTEREST TO IDENTIFY A PRELIMINARY RESEARCH TOPICYou are now ready to address the last concern of this chapter. How do you translate adefined personal interest of study into a suitable topic for formal research? Begin byreviewing your progress so far.Figure 1.1, introduced earlier in the chapter, shows the three stages for refining apersonal interest into a usable topic for research. Reading from left to right, notice that inTask 1 you selected an interest that you have identified as an important everyday problemneeding attention. If the interest definition is vague, you must clarify it through specificdefinition. Next, continue to Task 2.Introspection narrows the interest through the choice of a particular subject,perspective, and vantage point. Choosing a vantage point allows access to a definedacademic field of study. Now, address the final stage for selecting the preliminary topic ofstudy, which is the last concern of this chapter.When addressing Task 3 of Figure 1.1, you leave personal understanding, and focus onthe shared knowledge of the academic community. To accomplish this transition, theresearcher needs to translate the research interest into a preliminary topic for formalresearch. As stated earlier in this chapter, the research interest must align with the externalconcern and work of that academic community. Why is this important? Without aligningthe research interest to a topic of study the academic community addresses, there is noavenue by which to gain access and entry to the relevant academic body of knowledge.Some students believe that they have a well-defined study interest topic and proceeddirectly into research. These students complain that they have used the Internet and been
1113691 – Elsevier S & T ©to the library. They are working hard at gathering information about their topic, but canfind nothing written on it. Rarely does a researcher stumble onto a unique and previouslyunidentified topic of study. Previous work has been done on almost all the interests weconsider. So what is the difficulty? Usually the difficulty is a lack of appropriate academicterms. Students often try to use their everyday vocabulary to access the specific language,vocabulary, and discourse of a specialized field.
