Choosing your own topic
Let's assume that your course instructor for a course on introductory community health wants you to pick a particular health topic relevant to teenagers, and then discuss how to effectively promote healthy behaviours to teenagers. Pick a topic that interests you, or that you have some knowledge of. Think about how you would teach teenagers about it. Draw on your own experiences, your readings, and just general knowledge.

For example:

Behaviour	How to promote
stopping smoking	reading medical literature for ideas modeling (observation) trial and error (self motivation) taking a class on how to stop smoking

Stating your research questions
Try to be as open minded as possible at this early stage of inquiry. What you are attempting to do now is find background information on your general topic, so keep an open mind and explore your topic. Run with any ideas that come to you and see where they lead. For example, you might ask yourself the following:

• Do prior experiences (like being physically fit, or being popular at school, etc.) have any effects?
• How does peer pressure affect smoking habits?
• Is age a factor in starting to smoke?
• Are there demographic or social factors that might influence learning this habit (like social class, peer groups, income levels, learning from parents and/or siblings, etc.)?
• What motivators are involved?

Refining your topic
At this preliminary stage start thinking about how you will go about finding out background material for your topic. Think about keywords and concepts (like smoking, tobacco use, influence of popular culture, media pressure, etc.) that might be used to look for material.

Depending on your course and your assignment instructions the choice of topics will vary considerably. You may be asked to look at a historical perspective of a particular topic, or compare two or more different topics, or even discuss a research design for a particular topic. No matter what it is the method of going about obtaining background materials is similar.

The remaining tutorial modules and example pages in this series will help you with more specific search strategies and suggest library sources that you should be familiar with.