Your choice of a topic makes a huge difference! You should pick a topic that is:

a) appropriate to the course;

b) interesting to you;

c) clearly defined; and

d) narrow enough so that you can do a good job of research before the deadline.

Where to start? Ask yourself:

What social phenomenon (e.g., marriage, warfare, diseases, education, crime, women’s work, and so on) are you interested in?

What particular example of that phenomenon would you like to investigate? Where would you situate it in time and place? For example, instead of diseases in general, you might study AIDS in contemporary South Africa; instead of war in general, you might study submarine warfare in the Atlantic in World War Two; instead of education in general, you might investigate Japanese high schools; instead of crime in general, you might write about kidnapping in Colombia.

Now pick a second phenomenon that you think is related to the first. For instance, AIDS in South Africa AND the policies of the government; submarine warfare AND code-breaking; Japanese high schools AND the success of Japanese corporations; kidnaping AND the drug traffic in Colombia.

Now explain how you believe they are related. Is one phenomenon the cause of the other? Are both the consequence of a third phenomenon? Or are is their relationship just a coincidence? This is your hypothesis.

Remember: a hypothesis is NOT a conclusion. It is an educated guess about a relationship between two phenomena that you plan to investigate. It’s okay to present your hypothesis in your Topic Proposal and in the thesis statement of your paper, even if your research later shows that your guess was wrong. Remember: the purpose of doing research is not to prove you were right all along, but to show that you have learned something new.

Now please write a Topic Proposal, that is a description of the phenomena you would like to study and how you think they might be related. It will be returned to you with suggestions.

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