Here’s a question for you: If you had to write 40,000 words on any given topic, what would it be? Nothing coming to mind? Did your brain just freeze up? That’s likely, and this is because thinking of the totality of the dissertation as a writing project is NOT an especially useful way of getting started on this mammoth endeavor. The aim of this article is to help you take much more reasonable first steps toward finding a topic that will work for you both in terms of creating an inspiring dissertation journey and also of meeting your program’s requirements for an appropriate research topic.
You’ve probably learned that research topics need to be clear, compelling, and current; but aside from that, how do you pick one out? First of all, remember that research needs to stem from an identified problem (Luse, Mennecke, & Townsend, 2012). Some people prefer to maintain positive thinking and avoid dwelling on the negatives in life, and for some this can truly help with maintaining an optimistic outlook. However, keep in mind that dissertation research is typically geared toward promotion of positive change, and to support such change, you must understand the nature of the problem that you are trying to address. Spending a large amount of time dwelling on problematic conditions and immersing yourself in the related literature might make you feel like a Debbie Downer. But, rest assured that you are simply going through the necessary process of problem definition, and your research will be much more impactful if you take the time to fully understand your problem and its adverse effects in the world around us (Luse et al., 2012).
In addition to a problem, there also needs to be a gap in the research literature related to this problem. A very important point that we often emphasize in the course of our dissertation consulting with clients is that “gap” is not synonymous with “no research” on the topic. Instead, a research gap is substantiated by location of studies whose authors have in various ways identified a need for additional research on a particular area (Sandberg & Alvesson, 2011); usually you need to identify at least three such studies to support your gap statement. It is also important that these calls for additional research were made in studies that were published recently (i.e., within last 3-5 years) because it is reasonable to guess that calls for research in older studies might have already been addressed. With this in mind, let’s start thinking about strategies to help you develop the actual research topic for your dissertation or thesis.
Vital First Step: Consider Your Program!
As you begin thinking over possibilities for your study’s topic, it is absolutely crucial that you keep the focus of your doctoral or master’s program in mind. Although a certain amount of revision and editing is typical as you develop your dissertation, the extensive revisions required to address misalignment between topic and field of study is definitely something you want to avoid (this can involve a complete rewrite in the worst of cases!). So, right from the start, you need to make sure your topic aligns with your program’s focus. This means that your problem statement needs to be framed so that it has clear relevance for people who are affected by your field of study, and it also means that your significance statement needs to have clear relevance for policy and practice within this field.
Although this might seem obvious, there is actually more “grey area” in topic alignment than you might imagine. I mean, you clearly wouldn’t propose use of qualitative research and analysis to explore social skills development in children with autism spectrum disorders if you are working toward a PhD in business finance. This proposed study is obviously misaligned with a business finance focus. In our dissertation assistance experience, though, we find that misalignment problems between field of study and topic are actually much more subtle than in this example. For example, let’s imagine that you are earning your doctoral degree in organizational leadership, and you want to put your statistical analysis skills to work by investigating how socialization within work groups influences individual workers’ sense of community. This is very clearly relevant for the workplace in general, but does it really align with an organizational leadership focus?
The answer to that is that it depends upon how you frame the topic. Does the problem that motivates your exploration of this topic have relevance for organizational leaders and leadership researchers? Are the implications for policy and practice of this study relevant for organizational leaders? Maybe, and maybe not. To align this topic with an organizational leadership focus, you would need to start by finding research that links worker sense of community with phenomena that are directly associated with organizational aims.
You might find in the research literature that sense of community in work groups has been associated with greater productivity and organizational commitment. This finding will help to link your dissertation topic with common organizational aims, but then you would also want to use the research literature to tie this topic in with leadership, perhaps by connecting leadership with workgroup dynamics in a general sense. Because you have clarified the potential for leaders to influence workgroup processes that in turn might influence employee commitment and productivity, you now have a topic that aligns with an organizational leadership focus. Success!
Even though you do have your dissertation committee to help with evaluating your topic’s viability and alignment with your program, it is important to assess this alignment on your own as well. Unfortunately, sometimes committees can be a bit late pointing out alignment issues such as this. In fact, we have provided dissertation assistance to clients who asked for our help after progressing all the way through their proposals before receiving feedback that they needed to revamp their topics due to program-topic misalignment.
Starting off strong with a great topic that meshes well with the general aims of your program is the best prevention of this sort of trouble. Coming up with this great topic can be easier said than done, however, and if you’re finding it hard to pick a direction for your dissertation research, asking yourself the following questions just might help!
Question 1: What Is Your Passion?
One of the best ways of developing an awesome research topic is to follow your passions or personal interests (Leong & Muccio, 2006). Many of our dissertation consulting clients have shared that they chose their particular fields of study because these were deeply meaningful or satisfying to them. Following those sources of inspiration can yield great results in terms of topics that can work well with both quantitative and qualitative research approaches.
Maybe you went into the education field because you’re passionate about increasing the literacy rate in upcoming generations, or it might be that you chose social work because you are driven by a desire to propel the rights and inclusion of LGBTQ youth and adults. Maybe you’re a manager pursuing a doctoral degree in operations management because you are excited by the prospect of maximizing efficiency in business organizations. Whatever your dreams or fascinations might be, this is a great place to start when trying to come up with a dissertation topic.
The wonderful thing about this type of study is that you will be continually motivated by your own deep interest in the topic. Whether you end up conducting interviews with participants on your topic to support qualitative analysis or collecting survey data to inform a statistical analysis approach, your devotion to the topic will help to keep you driven and inspired through to the end of your study. A drawback to following your passions when selecting a dissertation topic, however, is that your ambitions might be larger in scope than a single study can address. In this case, you will need to find a way to focus on a smaller part of the topic and search for a research gap related to this specific area.
For example, perhaps you’re studying psychology and feel inspired by promoting the self-determination of adults with intellectual disabilities. Your dream study would involve a mixed methods (i.e., both statistical analysis of numerical data and qualitative analysis of text-based data) investigation of all of the factors that promote optimal self-determination in adults with intellectual disabilities in all arenas of their lives (e.g., work, home life, personal relationships, etc.).
Although this is a fabulous aim for your dissertation and you could certainly help so many individuals with this bounty of knowledge, it is far too expansive to be completed in a single study. So, narrowing your focus would definitely be wise (Leong & Muccio, 2006), unless your plan is to work on your dissertation for the next 10 to 20 years (we’re guessing it’s not!). Reviewing the recent literature on self-determination of this population might help to generate more specific ideas (hint: review the recommendations for future research sections toward the ends of recently published studies to find possibilities).
Thinking about what is feasible for you in terms of data collection on your passion topic can also help to narrow your focus. For example, maybe you love the idea of interviewing adults with intellectual disabilities about their perspectives on self-determination and would be able to easily recruit participants for such a study. In this case, you might specifically search for research gaps that would be nicely addressed through an exploratory qualitative research approach.
These types of considerations can often help to narrow and focus your dissertation topic around one particular area of your passion project. But what if your passions are not easily shaped into a study in your field? Maybe your passion is ice cream, but your field of study is human resources; what then? The incentive effect of ice cream on productivity, anyone? Well… maybe not. In this case, let’s examine a few more questions that might help to stimulate a great idea for your dissertation topic.
Question 2: What’s Really Bothering You at Work?
Many doctoral candidates return to pursue graduate degrees that are associated with their professional fields after spending time developing their careers. In the course of our dissertation consulting experience, we have worked with educators, business managers, nurses, and human services professionals seeking graduate degrees to develop and update their skills or to increase opportunities for promotions in their fields. If you have had a certain level of prior immersion in your field, you have undoubtedly observed dynamics or patterns in your workplace that drive you crazy. Maybe you are a manager in a field that is troubled by high turnover, or perhaps you are a nurse and are continually challenged by incivility in the workplace. Or maybe you work in education and have seen repeated problems with effective implementation of new schoolwide practices or programs.
This type of workplace annoyance might actually be the seed of a great dissertation, and a satisfying thing about these types of studies is that you can help to alleviate a problem that you know is really frustrating! Now, it might be tempting to use these issues to conduct a “revenge dissertation,” where you collect and analyze data from your coworkers just to showcase your supervisor’s incompetence. We suggest that you resist this urge and instead consider the possibility that if you’re seeing the problem in your workplace, then others are likely seeing it in their workplaces as well. If you can connect this problem with a gap in the research literature, you’re on your way to completing a study that might contribute to the alleviation of this problem. That’s inspiration!
Let’s consider an example of how this might look, imagining that you are working within an industrial-organizational psychology framework. Maybe you have observed abusive interactions in your workplace that you view as severe enough to be considered bullying, but you notice that coworkers who engage in this behavior often don’t experience consequences and in fact are sometimes even promoted to higher positions. Your sense based on observations at work is that some leaders are more responsive to bullying than others, and so you decide to search the literature to find a gap related to leadership and bullying.
You’re not interested in conducting an exploratory study in the qualitative research vein, and so you specifically seek out opportunities that would permit a quantitative examination of this topic. But, workplace bullying is an area of research that is receiving quite a bit of attention currently, and you find that there are many researchers who have already conducted the types of statistical analysis examinations of relationships between leadership and bullying prevalence that you were interested in examining. Where do you go from here?
What you can do from this point is narrow in on specific factors related to this topic that might lead you to a research gap. Reflecting again on your observations in the workplace, it seems that certain departments seem to permit bullying to a higher degree than others, although the effects of this behavior spread across departments. When you return to the literature you find that there isn’t much research on how the leadership-bullying relationship varies across departments within organizations in your industry, and so you have your gap!
By conducting statistical analysis of data on leadership style, bullying prevalence, and department using a large sample of participants drawn from a variety of organizations in your industry, you might be able to shed some light on relevant patterns across organizations in your field. Through your study you stand a chance of contributing insights into what allows bullying to continue in organizations where many managers do care about this problem, which might then lead to policies that help address performance of those managers who let such behavior slide.
Through this movement between your personal observations at work and the literature on the topic, you have come up with a dissertation topic that you truly care about and that might really help others facing the same problem. That’s a great contribution to make with your dissertation!
Question 3: What’s Going Really Well at Work?
Now, I know that I started off this article by pointing out the importance of understanding your research problem when developing the basis for your study, and so you might be wondering why thinking about something that is going really well at work might be a useful way of developing your research topic. The reason this approach can be fruitful is because in the face of generally challenging conditions, some organizations or workgroups just seem to be more successful than others. If you’re lucky enough to work in a setting like this, then you might take advantage of this opportunity by conducting an examination of the “exemplary case.” This is a study that basically explains to the reader, “when it’s going well, it looks like this.”
The research literature is strengthened by a multiplicity of quantitative and qualitative research methods and designs that in their various ways clarify the nature of problems as well as their possible solutions. Studies that document the predictors of workplace problems alongside studies that explore perceptions of conditions where such problems are milder or nonexistent together create a research literature that is rich and informative.
To illustrate how this might work, let’s consider an example. We work often with doctoral candidates in educational leadership programs, and one consistent area of difficulty discussed during dissertation consulting with these professionals is implementation of schoolwide programs. In particular, adoption of data-driven decision making on a schoolwide basis proves challenging, as evidenced by a hefty research literature disseminating findings to this effect.
Imagine, then, that in your work as an educator, you have experienced a strikingly successful schoolwide implementation of a program involving data-driven decision making. This type of “success story” might prove very useful for researchers and practitioners who are looking to understand the processes and predictors related to smooth implementation of these widely challenging schoolwide programs. Supporting the gap in knowledge and consequent need for research around successful implementation of such programs is typically easily accomplished, especially when you are proposing to use a qualitative research method that will allow for flexible exploration to generate new knowledge on the phenomenon.
Question 4: Is There Something Problematic Going on in Your Community?
If following your passions or thinking about conditions at work does not lead to any good candidates for your topic, these next three ideas might help you come up with a viable direction. Depending on your field of study, you might consider what is happening in your own community as a source of ideas for your dissertation research. As noted in the above discussion about use of work-related problems as “inspiration” for your study, problems that you observe in your local community are likely also experienced by people in other communities. This means that following such topics into the research literature might lead you to discover some eligible research gaps to investigate.
It might also be that certain communities are more prone to certain types of concerns than others, which might create a need for comparative investigation (e.g., a causal-comparative statistical analysis) or in-depth case study exploration (e.g., a multiple case study using cross-case qualitative analysis) to help shed light on such problems as connected with local conditions. Considering community issues like crime, healthcare access, educational outcomes, employment opportunities, etc., can often lead to inspiring ideas for your study.
Question 5: What’s Going Really Well in Your Community?
The flip side of the above is using the successes or strengths found in your community as a source of inspiration for your dissertation topic. Just as it can help to understand why and how things are going badly (e.g., predictors of crime or school failure), it can also be useful to investigate the circumstances surrounding successes in your community. These types of studies can provide a very useful contrast to research that documents the predictors of dysfunction.
Exploratory qualitative research and analysis can be very useful in presenting a portrait of the perceptions or dynamics involved in successful community endeavors. Or, paying attention to the apparent correlates of success can lead you to construct a quantitative study to determine the predictors of success through statistical analysis. In our experience providing dissertation assistance to our clients, we’ve seen some very inspiring studies evolve from observations of successes in the local community, such as school-community partnerships, neighborhood association activities, afterschool programs, and church-related programs.
Question 6: What’s in the News?
Finally, news stories are another great source of possible ideas for your dissertation topic. In particular, reporting that covers current areas of controversy in public life can be fruitful to explore, as these often point to areas where better understanding of a problem is needed. Contributing to a solid and thorough evidence base on various current issues of concern is a great use of your dissertation research, as empirical findings ideally occupy a prominent role in policymaking.
Especially in the face of contentious issues where strong differences of perspective exist, it is important to help build an empirical basis to support public understanding of issues and related policy implications. In our dissertation consulting experiences, we have assisted clients to develop and fine-tune research problems related to such hot topics as healthcare, immigration, effects of police body-worn cameras, and predictors of gun violence. Other highly charged issues such as racial health disparities, inclusion of LGBTQ students, and gender discrimination in the workplace have also provided timely and compelling areas of focus for our dissertation assistance clients.
Conclusion
Coming up with a great topic for your dissertation can be both fun and overwhelming. Turning to your passions, personal experiences, and observations of current events can often help to generate a spark of inspiration that might lead you in fruitful directions in terms of research topics.
Whatever pathway you take for identifying a possible topic for your dissertation, always follow this up by investing substantial time reviewing the relevant research literature so that you can understand how other researchers have approached the topic, what has already been established about the topic, and what remains to be discovered in future studies. Finding that research gap can sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack, but it’s worth the effort when the result is a study that truly contributes to knowledge and positive social change in your field. Happy hunting!
References
- Leong, F. T., & Muccio, D. J. (2006). Finding a research topic. In T. F. Leong & J. T. Austin (Eds.), The psychology research handbook: A guide for graduate students and research assistants (pp. 23-40). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Luse, A., Mennecke, B. E., & Townsend, A. M. (2012). Selecting a research topic: A framework for doctoral students. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 7, 143-152. Retrieved from https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=scm_pubs
- Sandberg, J., & Alvesson, M. (2011). Ways of constructing research questions: Gap-spotting or problematization? Organization, 18(1), 23-44. doi:10.1177/1350508410372151