GEN 499 week 1 Discussion 1

Discussion 1

Any researcher worth his salt will agree that finding a research topic is not easy. A good research topic needs to be concise-not broad, and interesting enough to make one committed to it to the end. Domestic violence, cultural practices and drug abuse would be my choice of research topics.

This three topics are interrelated and they all in a way contribute to the existence of the other.

Domestic violence is defined as any action or attitude in the home that dehumanizes or causes physical or emotional injury and that in any way is a violation of one’s personhood, drug abuse is the use of drugs for purposes not intended that results in harm to someone’s health while cultural practices can be seen as manifestations of culture of a given group.

Brainstorming is a great way of picking a topic from many that you might be excited about. Brainstorming enables one to start broad and look through different materials. The 5W questions can help to narrow (make specific) a topic of research. For example if you are researching on family violence. Who? Enables you to focus on the target population, what talks about types, When refers to timeframes of occurrence, Where? Refers to place of occurrence and finally, Why? The reasons.

These scholarly articles come handy in evaluating this claims:

Uslucan, H. (n.d.). Book Review: Family Violence in a Cultural Perspective, Violence: Diverse Populations and Communities, Current Controversies on Family Violence. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 766-768.

Tilden, V. (n.d.). Response of the Health Care Delivery System to Battered Women. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 309-320.

The use of scholarly sources is important because they are reliable: reviewed by independent experts and published by a reputable press. They are also published by competent and reputable authors.