This publication will show you how to pick an area, find out about it, and refine that area of interest so that you can move to the design stage. We could have divided this into two chapters, with the first being “picking a topic” and the second being “reviewing the literature.” The problem with that, though, is that in our experience people almost always do these things at the same time. Napoleon is quoted as saying that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” It is equally true that “no research question survives contact with the literature.” We will therefore look at question specification as a circular process, with your original ideas being modified by what you find in the literature, being rethought, being further refined by more literature, and so on. Source: Social Work Research Methods: From Conceptualization to Dissemination