Elizabeth Braswell Pearsall Library - North Carolina Wesleyan College

Sociology 215
Choosing a Topic

This online tutorial and review assignment will help you to develop the basic research skill of choosing a topic, which is often the most difficult part of the academic research process. Your instructor will provide you with general guidelines, such as possible topical areas and the scope of your project, but then it is up to you to determine the particular aspect of the general topic that you wish to research. Listed below are seven different methods / resources that you can use to help you choose a topic.

1) Consider your personal interests. What social phenomena have you read about or seen in the news that interests you? How can you personalize a topic?

2) What are the topics being discussed in the courses that you are currently taking, or would like to take? Look at your class notes. Look at the texts from your various courses and examine the tables of contents. Browse through the text and look at the bold headings for ideas that may catch your eye.

3) Consider looking at reference books in the Library. The reference books listed below are specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias concerning various subject areas of the social sciences, including sociological concepts. Look at the subject headings listed in some of the reference resources listed below. Also browse the index sections (if provided) to see if you can discover a topic that interests you. Then read the relevant pages for that topic and see if you can identify any important keywords that describe that topic. Please remember that reference items cannot be checked out and must be used in the Library.

Reference Title	Call Number
A Statistical Portrait of the United States: Social Conditions and Trends	R 306.097 S797 1998
Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology	R 301.03 J66b 2000
American Immigrant Cultures (2 Vols.)	R 305.8 A448 1997
Encyclopedia of Aging (3^rd Edition) (2 Vols.)	R 305.26 E56 2001
Encyclopedia of American Social History (3 vols.)	R 301 E56
Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd Edition (4 vols.)	R 301.03 E56e 2000
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (15 vols.)	R 303 E56
Encyclopedia of Women and Gender (2 Vols.)	R 305.403 E56 2001
Handbook of Marriage and Family (2 vols.)	R 306.8 E56 1995
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (18 vols.)	R 300 I61 1968
Social Science Encyclopedia	R 300.3 S678 1996

4) Browse the tables of contents of current periodicals related to Sociology, Justice Studies, and Psychology. Below is a partial list of Sociology-related journals:

American Journal of Sociology
American Sociological Review
Annual Review of Sociology
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Feminist Studies
International Social Science Journal
Journal of Black Studies
Journal of Marriage and the Family
Journal of Social Issues
Social Problems

5) Take a look at the Library of Congress Subject Headings (5 vols.) [Located next to the Library's online catalog stations]. This resource provides an alphabetical list of all Library of Congress subject headings. The set includes information about broader, narrower, and related headings. This set can provide you with ideas for a topic and also any key terms that are associated with that topic.

6) Print indexes are organized by subject heading and provide references to periodical articles. Each subject heading describes a topic. Once you determine the subject heading used by the index to describe your topic, you will usually find related, as well as broader and narrower terms used to describe that heading. Below is a list of indexes that will be of use to you. These cannot be checked out and must be used in the Library.

Index Title	Call Number
Sociological Abstracts	IND 301 S688
Social Sciences Index	IND 300 S678
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature	IND 051 R286

7) You can also use the World Wide Web to search for topics. Listed below is a selected list of search engines, directories, gateways, and an idea generator. Try browsing each of these resources to see if you can identify a topic.

WWW Virtual Library: Sociology
[http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/w3virtsoclib/]
Old Dominion University Libraries Idea Generator
[http://www.lib.odu.edu/libassist/idea/index.php]
Social Science Information Gateway
[http://www.sosig.ac.uk/]

After you find a potential topic, the next step is to put together a set of search terms. Try to formulate your topic as a question. (Example: Is there a relationship between family income and teen pregnancy?). Then pull out the important terms from the question (e.g. teens, pregnancy, and family income).

Click here to go to the "Choosing A Topic" Review Assignment

Sociology subject guide

Finding Reliable Web Sources

Using Article Databases

Scholarly Journals Vs. Popular Magazines: What's the Difference?

Identifying Empirical Studies

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ASA Style Guide--Quick Sheet

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