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PSY 219 Early Childhood Development : Focusing your Topic

What's a good topic?

Which of these is the better topic: 

Why is birth order important? Are first born children more likely to succeed academically compared to their younger siblings?
What is postpartum depression? What impact can highly-involved fathers have on lessening the impact of  a mother's post partum depression on child development?
  • What makes the topic 'better'? 

Pick one of these topics and brainstorm a way to make it better:

Play based education Technology and young children
Resilience  Developmental Disorders

 

Strategies to focus your topic:

Too many results?

Look at the titles/abstracts. These are likely all more specific than your search. Do any of them seem interesting or give you ideas of how to narrow your topic?

What are you hoping to do in your paper? 

You should be seeking to draw conclusions based on your research questions how will you be doing that?

  • By comparing/contrasting two different things (two treatments or two populations)?
    • How do male and female college athletes differ in how they deal with academic stress?
  • By examining a potential causal relationship?
    • Is how a student deals with stress related to study habits and procrastination?
  • By proposing potential solutions to a problem?
    • Does a stress-management workshop help students earn higher test scores?

Does your topic have each part of PICO?

P I C O
Population: Who are you studying Intervention: What is being 'done' to them/what makes them different Control/Comparison: Who are you comparing this do (don't always have to state in research question Outcome: What are you hoping to see/ guessing will happen?
Children who have lost a parent who have preexisting anxiety symptoms compared to children who do not have anxiety more likely to demonstrate symptoms of PTSD