Race, Gender and Social Justice: Developing Your Research Topic

A review of previous studies can be a good place to begin. These can be easily located by searching for "literature review" or "essay" as a search term. Some databases will also include literature reviews as a document type. Mot scholarly journals articles in the social sciences will begin wiht a review of the relevant literature.

Browsing hte table of contents of a good journal can also help your develop your research topic. In this example, the journal Gender & Society can be found from the Journals A to Z tab. This will link you to either a database or the publisher's webpage where you can review recent issues.

Here are the titles of some of the articles in the August 2012 issue.

• Gendered Organizations in the New Economy

• Adolescents of the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Male Role Models, Gender Role Traits, and Psychological Adjustment

• Normative Resistance and Inventive Pragmatism: Negotiating Structure and Agency in Transgender Families

Subject encyclopedias, textbooks and recent books can all provide a good place to generate ideas for a research topic. Most of these sources will provide suggested sources to help you get started. Things to look for...

• Chapters in a book (newer books in the Cheng Online Catalog will include and search table of contents)
• eBooks will allow your to easily skim the content of a book
• The Online Catalog may also suggest similar titles for you to examine
• Click on the book title to view the descriptive information. Notice the subject headings and click on those.

In this example, the book, Reshaping the work-family debate, includes a chapter on the "culture wars as class conflict".