 friends welcome to my channel I am Arpita Kharwa and in this video I am going to talk about how you can choose a research topic. Now this video is relevant for all those who are planning to do their PhD or who want to present a research paper in any university or who are in their masters final year and are looking forward to do their dissertation or if you have enrolled yourself in an MFIL program in that case too this video is going to help you a lot. Now choosing a research topic is the most challenging part of any research because it is the base and it is the starting point of the research. If you don't choose a research topic appropriately chances are that you might end up leaving the research all together. I have seen a lot of students who struggle with their research topic take up anything start doing their research and towards the end of their PhD they find that their guides have all together rejected the topic and they have to begin again by choosing another topic which is more appropriate or else if you have not chosen a specific appropriate topic you might yourself leave the research because you don't know where to go what to do how to justify the topic. So in this video I'm going to give you a step by step guide which is going to help you to choose a research topic very easily and start with your research. So let's start. Now the first important thing that you must remember when you decide to choose a research topic is your interest area. Yes guys you should always remember the fact that the research topic should be from your interest area. There are a lot of students who call me every day and ask me that ma'am can you please suggest me a research topic and I sometimes wonder that you would probably come tomorrow and ask me that ma'am I think you are well read and you are well educated so is it okay if you can select a life partner for me you would never do that right because you know that life partner cannot be selected by anybody you need to know your own likes dislike your own compatibility with a person and only then you can decide whom to marry. The same thing exists in the case of choosing a research topic. Research topic is very individualistic you need to see a topic you need to choose a topic which appeals to you. I'm an anti-feminist so if somebody asked me that okay you have to do a feminist study of some particular author or a particular work I would really be unhappy I would not know what to do what not to do and I would not feel like doing the research. On the other hand my interest areas are psychology and mythology so if I choose a topic which is related to these two areas I would feel like doing research I would feel like studying a lot more and finding out my own interpretation. So you need to always remember the fact that if you're not happy the learning would not occur so the first prominent factor in any field of study is your interest area. Now the first important thing that you need to understand here is that look into the vast field of literature into the ocean of literature and decide what is your interest area. It can be a particular literary movement like transcendentalism, romanticism, modernism. It can be a particular literary theory for example Marxism, psychoanalytical criticism or maybe feminism. It can be a particular author maybe you are a big fan of Shakespeare or Jane Austen or maybe Jerry Pinto so you can even take up that writer and you know look at that writer from a very very new angle. Another important area where you can do your research is any literary art form. For example paintings, cinema all these important art forms are nowadays incorporated in literary research so if you are really interested in knowing more about cinema, filmography, cinematography in that case take up a book and its adaptation okay you can take up a movie and the book on which that movie was based and then do a comparative study that would be a great thing or you can take up a particular literary genre maybe crime fiction, detective or maybe if you're interested in children's literature. So by knowing your interest area you actually know what you would like to invest your next three years into. For example my interest area is psychology and I'm really very interested in studies of books as well as movies. So I took up these two movies Dears in the G and Eat Pray Love which has Julia Roberts as the leading star and I devised a topic based on my interest area. So my topic the initial research topic was quest of self-discovery a comparative study of the female protagonist in Dears in the G and Eat Pray in Love. So you can see how I was able to figure out the topic by knowing my interest area better. So in the similar fashion you can also know your interest area and then figure out what particular topic would you like to do a research on. After knowing your interest area the next important thing that you must do in order to finalize a research topic is background study. Let's first look at the aim of research. What do you think is the aim of research? Aim of research is either to find out some new fact or to revisit the existing fact and look at it and see if they're still valid today. So basically research aims at adding something new to the existing body of knowledge. Now if you take up a research topic on which a lot of work has already been done then you would just be copying from a place and pasting it in your research and that will not be called as a research because you are not adding anything new in the existing body of knowledge. So it is very important for you to do a background study of all the works which has already been done on that particular topic. For example when I decided to take up a topic in which I would be looking at deer's indigie and eat prey love from psychoanalytical point of view I first saw what works were already done in this particular field and I found out that a lot of works have been done on these movies but they have been done from feminist point of view. Nobody has actually compared these two works and looked at both these works from psychoanalytical point of view. So I knew that I'm going to add something new to the existing body of knowledge. Now it doesn't matter that you're taking up a new author like Jerry Pinto and doing a research because nobody has ever done a research on him. You can also take up any old author like Shakespeare or Jane Austen or George Iliad and look at their works from a different angle which is still not explored. So when you will be reading the previous research papers of scholars who have done some work in this particular field where you will be working on you would find out the research gap. Now what is a research gap? A research gap is areas which were left unexplored in the previous researches and from that particular research gap you will get your topic. So make it a habit before choosing a research topic you go through different articles, journals and existing research papers and then figure out a research gap and finally you take up either a totally unexplored area or a partially unexplored area and begin your research. Also remember that this background study is going to help you a lot when you will be writing your synopsis or you will be writing an introduction to your thesis because in your synopsis you need to justify your topic and also mention the previous works which have been done in that particular topic. A review of literature is an essential part of her research and if you don't do it then your research is not complete. And finally another important thing that you must understand before you decide your research topic is to limit the genus. Now what do you mean by limiting your genus? If you take up a very bulky topic for example exploring symbolism in the poetry of W. B. Yeats this seems to be a very simple and a very sweet research topic but you cannot understand how bulky this topic is. There have been more than 250 poems written by W. B. Yeats and each poem contains millions of symbols. So how are you going to present all of this in a research paper or in a PhD thesis of about 250 pages? Now this is a very bulky topic and this is going to be a never-ending research. So what is important is to become specific. After you know your interest area, after you know the research gaps in the previous researches you need to make your research topic extremely specific or else you would find that if you've taken a very open-ended research topic you are going to go haywire and you will never reach a definite conclusion at the end of the research and you might find that your entire PhD thesis was concluded to be nothing at the end. So in that case what is important is that you know a very specific topic and how would you get to a specific topic? Understand either take up two or three authors or take up few selected works of one particular author. If you take up five authors and you are researching on ten works of each of them you would find that in a PhD thesis of 250 pages you would just be summarizing and giving an introduction to all of these works and that would not be a PhD thesis that would be a mere summary of 50 works. So it is important either you take up two authors and one one work of each author or you take up one author and few works of that author but become very selective in what you are choosing. Also understand the fact that whenever you are doing a background study you should always take up works which you have read and also you must note that it's not just that the work you would be talking about in your entire research you would also be bringing a lot of different associated theories. For example if you're doing a research on post-colonial literature and any particular writer like Chinua Aachibe you need to bring in Bill Brown's theory of thing. Bill Brown is a great post-colonial thinker who said that in all these post-colonial works you will find that the post-colonial world represent thing theory. What is this thing theory? Every colonized person feels as if he has no identity in the world and his existence is reduced to a thing. If he is not of any use people are going to throw him. So his existence is merely a existence of a thing. So whenever you're doing a research on any post-colonial work you need to bring all these different and associated theories and look at these theories as well as their interpretation on the work that you have picked up for your research. So your research would not only go around the two or three authors you have chosen but it is also going to go beyond that. You're going to explore a lot of theories and you're going to look at those works in the light of those theories. So have the habit of limiting your genus before you finally decide your research topic. With that note I would like to end this video lecture. It was really amazing discussing this topic with you guys and I would also be making a lot of videos on PhD research paper, how to write a research paper, how to go about with your PhD thesis and what are the mistakes that you should avoid doing and how you can make this journey of PhD a lot more easier and a lot more fulfilling. So stay tuned to this channel. If you've not yet subscribed then it's time to subscribe to this channel because I'll be posting a lot of videos on all these topics in the upcoming weeks. Apart from that another important announcement I would like to make, registrations are open for the online course of UGC-Net English Literature according to the new syllabus. You can look at the list of all the writers that we cover in our online course in detail on our website www.arpatakarwa.com. The link is given in the description box below. 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