Child, Youth & Family Studies: Writing and Research

First of all you need to think about what interests you and then brainstorm some ideas. One technique you can use is called concept mapping or mind mapping.

1. Write your topic/idea in the centre of the page; draw a bubble around it.
2. Now create new bubbles around the edges of this bubble, containing all the ideas that you can think of; use lines to connect these bubbles to the main idea or topic.
3. Continue adding related ideas, using lines to connect them, until you've run out of ideas.

Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1: At-Risk Youth

Example 2: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

University of Arizona has an online mapping tool. Just go through the steps and at the end you can send your work to any of your email accounts.

Now take a look at your concept map. If you try to do a presentation about the subject in the middle you will probably be talking for a very, very, long time. 

You need to look at the ideas as the side and see which one you like the most. 

So I can't write about substance abuse because it is too big a topic. I noticed that I am really interested in the prevention of it, so I am going to focus on that. Prevention is a narrower topic of substance abuse.

Prevention is still quite a big topic but I am going to think about how I can prevent it in my community which makes my topic even narrower. Maybe even too narrow but you need to start somewhere!

Take a look at this video from Las Positas College Library to see how they develop their ideas.

Here's another example:

Adapted from: ENGL 1050 Thought & Writing Research Guide: Deciding on a Topic, Western Michigan University

Using our Find It box on the library homepage, you will get access to many different types of resources.

Your results will look something like this:

1. Is called a Research Starter. It is like Wikipedia but more reliable.
2. Is how you can limit your search to books (Catalogue Only) or journal articles (Scholarly Peer Reviewed) as well as limit the date
3. Is how you can search for Canadian resources.
4. Is how you can find more encyclopedia entries.

Some more tips:

Use the "Tools" to email/print/ save yourself the article.   You can also see a citation if you press the Cite button. Always double check the citation is correct though!   Use the limits that are available:   Use Geography to limit to Canada (including provinces and cities)   Use Subjects to find more specific topic areas   Use Limit by Database if you only want medical articles (Medline or CINAHL) or psychology articles (PsycINFO)

From Melissa Wehler.

From Matthew Marmet.

From Collective Noun.

Now, how are you going to make your group work?

Okay, you don't have to make a presentation like Steve Jobs but it helps if you keep things simple for yourself and interesting for others.