The Goldilocks test is used to establish if a topic is too broad or too narrow.
Broad Topic
How do I know if my research topic is too broad?
- There is too much information available on the topic.
- The information you find on the topic appears to be divided into specific aspects.
What happens if my topic is too broad?
- You may experience difficulties finding specific keywords to use for your searches.
- If your keywords are too generic, the information you’ll find will cover a large amount of concepts, which may result in you losing track of your original line of research and going off-topic
- If you have access to a large amount of information, it may be difficult to decide which aspects of your research topic you want to investigate.
- If you don’t set up specific parameters that clearly define the research, you may face difficulties in deciding what data you need to collect and how to analyze it.
- You may be unable to provide a satisfactory answer to your research question!!!
How can I narrow down a broad topic?
- Concentrate on one specific aspect of the research problem (e.g. instead of investigating general HR practices you could concentrate on job satisfaction).
- Break down the main topic into smaller and more manageable parts. This will improve the focus of your literature review. (e.g. job satisfaction of international employees)
- Chose a specific geographic area to narrow down the focus of your research. Keep in mind that you will have to collect your primary data in your Country of choice. (e.g. job satisfaction of international employees in Irish companies).
Narrow Topic
How do I know if my research topic is too narrow?
- It is difficult to find literature on the topic.
- There are not enough aspects of the problems to analyze.
What happens if my topic is too narrow?
- You may be unable to find sufficient academic research for your literature review, which would affect your ability to support your findings.
- You may be unable to collect sufficient primary data.
- Your findings may be inconclusive, or downright wrong, if you don’t have other datasets (secondary data collected via literature review) to compare them to.
How can I broaden a narrow topic?
- Look for broader associations. If you can’t find information on a specific brand, product, organization… look at the broader market. (e.g. If you wish to research Irish customers’ opinion of Costa Coffee but you can’t find enough information on the company, you could research the Irish coffee industry instead. This approach will allow you to collect data, not only on Costa, but also its bigger competitors, such as Starbucks).
