 Developing a good topic for your assignment makes searching for evidence easier and results in a better final product. Developing a good topic is a process, and in this video we'll show you how to follow this process when you need a topic of your own. Step 1 – Choose a topic To select a topic, start by thinking of aspects of your field that might be interesting to pursue, such as science education or diabetes treatment. You can also try strategies like thinking of topics that interest you or where you have experience, or subjects where you think there's a need for more research. You can also ask a professor for ideas. Search for general topics that interest you on Wikipedia to get a general orientation to a subject you want to investigate further. As an example, my general topic is going to be reduction of in-hospital infections. Step 2 – Turn your topic into a question Once you've decided on a topic, take that idea and think about it as a question. What do you want to know about the topic? Here are some examples of the types of questions you can ask. How is blank made or done? What is the value of blank? What are the causes of blank? What is the relationship between blank and the outcome of blank? For example, for my topic, I'll ask what is the relationship between hand sanitizing stations in emergency rooms and in-hospital infections? Step 3 – Refine your question Once you have an initial question, you can refine it using two different techniques – PICO and concept mapping. PICO is great for quantitative clinical topics, whereas concept mapping is good for qualitative or non-clinical topics. How to use PICO? PICO stands for P – Patient, Population, or Problem, I – Intervention or Exposure, C – Comparison, and O – Outcome. To use PICO, answer questions about each of these elements. For example, for patient, population, or problem, what are the characteristics of the patient or the population? What is the situation or disease you're interested in? For intervention or exposure, what do you want to do with the patient, person, or population? For example, treat, diagnose, or observe. For comparison, what is the alternative to the intervention? For example, placebo, a different drug, or a surgery. For outcome, what are the relevant outcomes? For example, morbidity, death, or complications. Sometimes it can be useful to add a time frame to PICO. When you include the time frame of the topic, this is called PICO T. When you add the time frame, you have to ask over what period of time? Here's an example. A question using PICO T could look like, In P, do or does I result in O when compared with C over T? If I fill this in with information I want to look at from my topic, my new question would be, in emergency room visitors, do hand sanitizing stations result in fewer in-hospital infections when compared with no hand sanitizing stations over a year-long pilot period? That's a more specific question to look at. I chose PICO because it's a quantitative clinical topic. If my topic had been qualitative or non-clinical, I might have chosen concept mapping instead. Here's how to use concept mapping. A concept map or mind map is a technique where you connect your topic to related words. To create a concept map of your topic, step one, write down the broad topic, issue, or problem. Step two, write down all the relevant words, phrases, and ideas related to that topic that come to mind and draw lines to connect them to the topic. Step three, branch out with words related to your subtopics in the same way. And step four, review your map to re-examine your initial topic question. Look at the subtopics and their connections to see if there are ways you can make your question more precise. Here's an example of a concept map. First, we write down the broad topic, issue, or problem, which will be eating disorders. Now we write down the relevant words, phrases, and ideas related to that topic and connect them to the topic. I can think of anorexia, bulimia, teenage girls, body image, portrayal in the media, and Canada. Now we branch out with words related to our subtopics. I can branch out from body image to self-regard, focus on weight, negative self-talk, and body dysmorphia. And I can branch out from portrayal in the media to TV and film, social media, and Instagram influencers. Finally, we review our map to re-examine our initial topic question. So I'm interested in looking at anorexia specifically, teenage girls in Canada, and I'll look at the effect of TV and film. Now my question becomes, how to support portrayal of women in television and film influence the level of anorexia in teenage girls in Canada? There we go. You know the process for choosing and refining your topic. Explore the rest of this module for more details and examples of this process.