Dear Adil Hussain,
I think you should first start by trying to identify what your interests are. This is because "interest" is one of the major determinant factors as to wheather or not a person will be successful in conducting credible research. So you need to choose a topic that revolves around something (in your field of study) you have passion for so that when the research work get tougher along the line, ur passion for studying the particular problem will keep you going till you successfully finish.
Second, HRM is a broad field of study and if you plan to conduct research a work in HR, you need to select which aspect or areas in HR you want to inquire into. You may want to investigate a problem, processes, practices, principles or any researchable phenomena in such areas as Compensation Management, Reqruitment Process, Training &Development, Collective Bargaining or Negotiation, Trade Unionism & Labour Politics, Organisation Behaviour, Work Place Bullying, Ergonomics, Labour Laws, to mention a few. You just need to choose which area interest you the most, then you can begin to break that into smaller sub-topics through literature review and find a particular "gap" that your research will help fill. To find a gap requires that you identify a problem that your research will solve thereby producing new knowledge in the academic community.
Third, you must also take into account your career plan before choosing your research area. I mean if you plan to study Industrial Relations at your Masters level and for instance you have always dreamt of specialising in Industrial Psychology, it will be unwise to conduct your undergraduate research in such areas as Workplace Ergonomics. These might be related in some ways because they all fall within the study of HR but i think it is safer for anyone craving to become an Industrial/Organisational Psychologist to conduct his or her undergraduate research on such areas as Motivation, Leadership, or Occupational Stress etc. I hope you get what I mean?
The main point here is that you should choose a research topic that matches perfectly with both your areas of interest and career goal, while ensuring that such topic is so formed in other to solve newly identify problem and add new knowledge to that which we already have in the area/field of study in which the research is conducted.
I may not be sure that this is helpful but I believe it is unwise to ignore it.
Best Regards!
Thanks, Kunle! Your participation in EF makes it a better place!
I want to add some of my ideas about doing research. You should start by subscribing to an online professional HRM journal and reading the articles. Write a few paragraphs of notes about the research studies that the authors of the articles have done.
Also, take notes about the literature reviews in these articles, because the lit review tells you all about the other recent research that has been done.
As you read all the research articles in professional journals, also click around on the Internet to learn about the different research methods used in these articles. If you read an article about case study research, learn about case studies. If you find an article about survey research, spend time studying the ways to do good survey research.
Does that help?
:-)
What i needed actually was a person who can assist me.
It's great that you found some journal articles. So, can you write 1 or 2 paragraphs about each article? These paragraphs will tell the main idea of each article, and they will be useful in your Literature Review.
More importantly, by writing about the articles you will develop your own idea for your original research.
