Help with EPQ ideas please!

[BendandBreak]

Hello

My daughter is having real trouble finding a topic for her Sixth Form EPQ qualification. It's an independent research task where she has to write a 5000 word essay. Could anyone help please?

She wants to do something involving social media ..🙄
And is generally interested in policing, sociology, mental health care and the law.

Thanks for any help

Impact of social media on mental health - loads of research out there

Hi, thanks for answering, this was her idea so far actually but they have kind of poo-poo'd it and said it's too vague.
Like, social media is too vague.

She's thinking of doing it with a specific media, Tiktok maybe.

Something I have done PSHE lesson on for Yr 12's is the impact of social media on self esteem, you could pic something like instagram/snapchat and look into levels of photo shopping etc. How it impacts on peoples self esteem.

The whole 'social media' would be massive for her to investigate!

How about narrowing it down to the impact of a certain aspect of social media, for example:

• influencers
• gifting/ads
• screen addiction/ not being able to switch off in the evenings
• pressure for high likes or views
• not being able to delete things once it’s ‘out there’
• the impact of only sharing a very highly stylised version of life
• the fitness ‘experts’ and all the #thinspiration

And so on....

Does she know what degree she wants to do as it would be best to tie it in with that as it can then form the basis of her personal statement?

She will need to add lots of references to her work. I would recommend investigating scholar articles/books and articles in the subject first, see what’s available and then narrow the topic down. Otherwise she is going to be stuck further down the line while writing her research up... The topic has to be very specific. The narrower the better. For example how Kanye West election bid (and his mental health) was influenced by social media, etc etc.

The first part of her research work should essentially be the process of developing a suitably specific topic. EPQs get very tricky if either you can't easily find enough sources of information for your topic, or there is so much out there you can't stop working through it in order to write the essay ... (my daughter had something of the latter problem last year).

So, encourage her to go looking for the evidence / resources to answer the question she has in mind. Over a reasonably short period of time she should aim to narrow down the mental health question and the types of social media according to both what interests her and what she thinks she can find enough material to work with on.

Good luck to her!