How To Choose A Research Topic For A Dissertation Or Thesis (7 Step Method + Examples)

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In this video I'm gonna show you how to choose the best possible research topic for your thesis or dissertation, in the shortest amount of time. Plus I'm going to tell you how you can get free feedback and critique on your research topic idea from the Grad Coach team. Hey guys welcome to another episode of Grad Coach TV. My name is Derek and today we're going to be looking at how to find, how to evaluate and ultimately how to choose a research topic for your dissertation or thesis. We're going to be talking about a seven step process that we've used successfully with hundreds, if not thousands of students here at Grad Coach. If you follow this process step-by-step I have no doubt that you're gonna find a really really good research topic to work with and that that research topic is gonna be the smart choice for your dissertation or thesis. This video is based on an extract from our dissertation eBook which you can download absolutely free of charge. I'll include the link below this video. You might also be interested in some of the other dissertation and thesis related videos - we've got videos on how to write a research proposal, how to write a literature review, and pretty much everything that you'll need to get through the dissertation and thesis process. So we've got a playlist on that you can just visit our YouTube channel. I'll include the link below this video again. So without any delays let's jump right into it. Right so the very first step of finding and choosing a solid research topic is that you need to familiarize yourself with the basic research process. What I mean by the basic research process is that you need to understand things like research problems, research questions, a literature review, field work, methods such as surveys and questionnaires and focus groups, methodologies such as qualitative quantitative and mixed method methodologies. Now this might sound like I'm putting the cart before the horse somewhat but it is really important that before you start running down a path of inquiry looking at potential research topics it's really important that you understand the big picture of how research works and the essential components to pulling off credible research. If you don't understand these things if you pursue the idea before you understand the research process what you're gonna do ultimately is waste a lot of time pursuing ideas that simply aren't viable, pursuing ideas that have already been extensively researched, pursuing ideas that you want to execute in a certain way, but it's just not practical it's just not rigorous enough for for the requirements of your school. So it is really important to to first understand the core concepts, the basic concepts of research. Now you don't you definitely don't need to have an in-depth understanding but you do need to have a basic understanding. So when we talk about things like research problems and research design and methodologies and so forth that you understand what we're talking about this. So step one is get that under your belt have a basic understanding of how research works. Your university should provide you with a textbook or other resources to guide you in that respect. Failing that there's loads of information online. A little little Google will provide a lot of information. You can also check out the Crad Coach blog - we've got a section dedicated to to academic research which I'll include the link to below this video. So step one make sure that you understand the basics of the research process and then we can move on to step two. So once you've got a basic understanding of core research principles and and the basics of the research process, the next essential step is to make sure that you really understand what it is that your university requires from you for your specific research project. Now this might sound pretty obvious but I can't tell you the number of times I've seen students run down a path, spend so many hours days weeks months entertaining some research idea only to find out that for some reason that's not allowed by the university. So it's really really important to start with the core requirements, understand what the essentials are from your university and understand what the deal-breakers might be in terms of topics that are not allowed. At a minimum you want to make sure that you understand the following. Firstly the originality requirements, in other words how unique does your research topic need to be? Now this will vary a lot depending on your degree and and what sort of course you're enrolled in but you need to get clarity on what topic originality and uniqueness requirements they have for your specific research project. The second thing you need to look at is research topic restrictions. In other words what areas are you allowed to research. Do they need to link to certain modules or do you pretty much have freedom in in terms of what you can choose as long as it's within the domain of your degree. Another thing you need to understand is the data requirements - specifically does your university require that you have primary research that you have secondary research or do they require both. Another really important thing that you need to understand is what are the research methodology requirements. In other words do they have specific requirements about whether you need to do a quantitative study whether you need to do a qualitative study perhaps they have a requirement or they encourage you to do mixed methods. So it's really important to understand what are the expectations. The last really important thing that you need to understand is ethical requirements. All universities will have some sort of ethical framework and and some sort of ethical standards and and guidelines which everyone needs to adhere to and so you need to understand what those are and what that means in terms of limitations on your field work. It might mean that you can only interview certain people or that you can only ask certain types of questions and/or that you need clearance for for certain types of work or areas of research. So it's really important to understand what are those ethical requirements and what do they mean in terms of restricting your research topic. As you can see it's really important to understand what does the university need from you what what are the restrictions that they put in place. Otherwise you can spend a huge amount of time ultimately to land up in a dead end. The lesson here is know the rules of the game before you play and with that we can move on to step three. So now that you understand the rules of the game, you have license to start looking at potential research areas. The approach that we take to research topics is to start really broad and then narrow that down narrow that down until you get to a set of research potential research topics that we can then evaluate. We'll get to that later but the starting point for now is to identify broad research areas that interest you. So what you're looking for here is areas of your studies, the modules that you've done, that interest you. For example in an MBA context it might be something like social media marketing, it might be something like leadership, it might be something like innovation or innovative cultures. Whatever broad research areas have interested you as you've worked through through your degree. Make a list of those broad interest areas and they don't need to be at all pointed or specific. As you can see in the example that I just gave, we're not asking any specific question at this point in time. We're just saying what are the areas of research/theory that you've worked through through your studies and you've said wow that I really like that, that's really interesting, I'd like to know more about it. Now the caveat yeah is that the interest areas need to be areas that are intellectually appealing to you, that you have a curiosity about, but not that you have some sort of emotional charge or some sort of attachment or some preconceived notion about because ultimately if you take something that you really hold strong beliefs about and you go and delve into researching that, you're gonna bring all your biases with you. You're gonna bring subjectivity to your research which is really not welcome in in an academic context. What you're looking for is to go into an area of research with an open mind and to ask questions and and be comfortable with whatever answers you get. So it's really important to choose something that interests you, choose something that's going to keep you motivated through this long process, but don't choose a research area that is emotionally charged. While you're thinking about your broad interest areas there's two things that you might want to be thinking about at the same time. The first thing is faculty support. In other words, for whichever research topic areas that you're identifying, are there full-time faculty that would be interested, that have a research interest in that area that could potentially support you, could potentially be your supervisor. Generally it's smart to choose a topic or at least choose a research area that your university has good support for because that person will be able to guide you they'll build to give you feedback and they'll be able to assess the quality of your work as well a lot better. So you do ideally want to be looking at how can you line up your areas of interest with the areas of interest and held by the faculty. So that's one component. The other thing that you want to think about at this stage (and again this is it's just an ask to have and something to consider) is where you want to take your career post graduation. The dissertation or the thesis is a nice opportunity to build some specialism in terms of whatever direction you want to go in your career. For example if you are wanting to pursue, if you're studying a marketing degree but you are wanting to pursue something digitally oriented or online marketing oriented, then your dissertation is a nice opportunity to go and to zoom into that little niche so that you have a unique perspective when you start going for interviews and you can bring something unique to the table by way of this research that you've already done. So those are just two things to consider while you think about these broad areas of interest. Don't don't stress too much about this right now. As I say we'll just start really broad and then we'll narrow it down according to criteria. So at this stage pen down a few of your interest areas and then let's move on to step four. Right now that you have a good idea of your broad research interest areas it's time to start narrowing that down, time to start narrowing it down into a more niche area or more niche set of areas. The best way to do that the most efficient way to do that is to have a look at past dissertations by other students at your university and ideally within your same program, for example within an MBA program or MSc program. So the first step is to head over to the dissertation library or dissertation database for for your University and use your research areas your broad areas that you just identified, use those as keywords to search for dissertations in the database. At this point just pile all the dissertations that you can find pile them into a folder and keep them for review. The way that you're going to review them is quite simple. Now obviously you're not going to go and read a bunch of dissertations from start to end, what you're gonna do is you're gonna do a skim of some important sections to to get the information you need. I'd recommend that you look at the title because the title should be quite descriptive if it's a good title. Have a look at the executive summary or the abstract because that gives you a full idea of what the research is all about and then have a look at the introduction chapter because that gives you a good idea of how they came to to go from a broad research topic or a broad research area and to justify that down into a tighter topic. As you're looking at these dissertations or theses you need to ask yourself a few questions. The first question you want to ask yourself is what kind of research topics did these dissertations cover and and how did they turn these research topics into research questions.You might want to look for each dissertation what was the research topic and what were the research questions. Then importantly how broad or how narrow were these research topics. What does this tell you about the the requirement from the school in terms of how narrow and how niche they want you to go. Also importantly how original were the research topics. Were they're really groundbreaking or was it just a sort of localized twist on an established well-established theory. Then importantly how well justified with these research topics. In other words were the topics really important for society or at least for for the the area the field or, were they're just nice to know is because this gives you a good idea of what your university expects in terms of justification for a research topic. I can't tell you how many dissertations you need to review how many theses you need to review, but I would say that you need to keep going until you have narrowed your your handful of research areas down into a handful of more niche research areas. In other words until you've gone and taken those four or five broad research areas and narrowed them down into something more specific. Or perhaps you decided to scrap some of the the areas because you found stuff that was more interesting. But you want to at least walk away from this process with five potential research areas that are more tightly focused. For example if your broad interest area in the beginning was something like social media marketing then you might have narrowed that down to Facebook marketing or YouTube marketing. If your broad interest area in the beginning was reputation management you might have narrowed that down to consumer trust or consumer trust building. In other words the important thing is that you have gone and narrowed down from this broad interest area to something more specific something that has a body of theory that you can go and look at meaningfully, which is the next step. Right now that you've narrowed your thinking down from a broad area to a more niche research area, the next step is to hit the literature in other words hit the existing research the journal articles perhaps the textbooks and and get a good feel for the state of knowledge in the interest areas that you have in these more niche interest areas. The objective here really is just to understand where the current research is at, what what does the the the existing body of knowledge have to say about these research interest areas. Ultimately what you're looking for is to find the gaps is to find the the little areas of the puzzle the pieces of the puzzle that haven't been filled in yet because those will be ideal research topics. So right now what you're looking for is to get into the literature and understand what does the literature say about my areas of interest. So how do you do this? The best starting point is to head back to your modules head back to your coursework and use that as a starting point for finding relevant journal articles. The way you do that is go have a look at whichever parts of your modules spoke about these more refined interest areas that you have and see which journal articles they referenced. Go and pick those out. In addition to this you can head over to Google Scholar and you can use your keywords or your refined interest areas you can use those as keywords in Google Scholar. I'd say pick out the top five most relevant articles for whichever area you're interested in for each area you interested in and you should also have a look for any sort of annual review, any sort of recent combined literature review-type articles when you're looking on Google Scholar, because these will provide you with a really big picture view of the state of knowledge. So now you've got a whole lot of articles ideally five six seven high quality articles for each of the research interest areas that that you that you narrowed down to in the previous step and what you're gonna do with these is you're just gonna skim read through them. So what you're looking for again is the executive summary or in a journal context will be the abstract. Have a look at the introduction and you can have a look at the conclusion. That should give you a good idea of what each article is about and what are the key issues that they're raising through through each section. If you managed to get your hands on literature review type article that provides an overview of all of the literature, then do you spend the time actually reading through all of that because that is going to give you a really good view of the the full state of knowledge, at least at the time of print of that article. Another area that you want to have a look at at the end of each article is the reference list. So if you find one article that is really interesting and really relevant and is covering an area of the theory that that really interests you then ideally what you want to look at is look at that reference list and then pick out a few more articles that that article is reference and go and pull those out. This is a process of snowballing finding more articles through articles. Ultimately what you want to land up with is about 20 articles for each research interest area that you have each niche interest area that you have, because this number (it's hard to put a firm number to it) but if you've got the top 20 most relevant and recent articles, you'll have a decent idea of what the theory has to say about each research area. So spend the time in the literature review and then once you've done that once you have a good understanding of where things are at, then you can move on to the next step. Right now that you are familiar with the literature for your interest areas now that you understand what the current state of the research is in whatever areas you're interested in you can finally get to the important part of finding potential research topics. In other words we're now finally narrowing down from broad to niche to actual research topic. But how do you do that? Well there's three techniques that I'm going to show you that are really effective at finding suitable research topics. So the first technique for finding suitable topics finding original research topics is to utilize what we call the FRIN - that's an acronym for further research is needed. What I mean by this is that within most journal articles if not all journal articles, towards the end they'll generally have some discussion about the need for further research on that specific area. So if you're looking at current articles in other words fairly recent articles if you look at that FRIN section if you if you assess what they state as being needed in terms of further research you're going to have a source of really really useful research topic ideas . The upside to this approach is that provided the articles you're looking at are recent, the upside is is that this is going to be a really really original research in terms of the opportunity at hand. If a recent article by a reputable researcher is saying that there's a need for research over here, then you can be pretty sure that that is is genuinely an original and authentic need (i.e. a strong potential research topic). So the upside is originality. The downside is that these might not really be areas that interest you. You might find that the areas that they proposed for further research or just not up your alley or you might just have more practical limitations that they require some sort of methodology or they require some sort of context that you just don't have access to so there's pros and cons to this approach. but if originality is really important, then the FRINis a fantastic starting point. If you have a good bundle of articles that are recent you're going to have many many FRIN opportunities just kind of sitting on a platter there. So make sure you look at those. Right the second technique that you can use to find good research topics is to assess whether the existing research is relevant and suitable within a specific context. So what I mean by that is that you can take a body of theory that has already been pretty well researched or just moderately researched and you can assess whether that's relevant within a certain context, such as a certain country or within a certain industry or within a certain demographic group, socio-demographic conditions. You can assess whether or not the existing theory is is relevant there and if there is any question mark about whether it is relevant there, then that is a research topic that is potentially worth considering. For example you might take a research topic like a consumer trust (consumer trust is something that's extensively researched) but you might say well consumer trust has been researched extensively but largely in an American or a first-world country context and for certain types of products or for certain types of services. So you might make an argument that there is a need for for research into consumer trust within a third world or developing country context and for a specific type of service or specific industry. In other words you'll be putting a unique spin you'll be putting a different contextual lens onto existing research. So this can be very effective when you're interested in the area where there is a good deal of research already but just nothing that's been done close to home close to to a population that you have access to. An important point to make with this is that there needs to be a legitimate reason as to why the existing research might not be valid or might not be relevant in a certain context. You can't just say well it was it's been done extensively but it hasn't been done in this country. If this country is much the same as the countries that it has been done in then there isn't really an argument that this is essential research so you need to find a valid argument for why the existing research might not be valid it might be something like well this cultural differences. It might be that these socio-economic conditions are very different and that impacts decision making by the consumer and impacts trust. It might be that there's just different belief systems etc etc, might be this is a different societal structure. Whatever the case might be you need to have some sort of argument as to why this unique context might not hold the existing research as valid. So that's a useful approach that you can use. The third approach that you can use is far less structured and the third approach is basically just brainstorming and mind mapping potential research topics - just allowing yourself to have a bit of uncensored free thinking in terms of potential research topics. What you will often find is that once you've you've immersed yourself in the literature, once you've immersed yourself in in the state or the current state of the research, that can just stimulate a lot of free thinking and so if the other two methods haven't really brought anything for you, what you can do is you can just sit down and you can brainstorm research topic ideas. You can mindmap a bunch of potential topic directions that the theory might be able to go in and what you do there is you write down your your your your stack of ideas from that session. Don't restrict your thinking just put it down on paper come up with a list of ideas and then sit down with that list and go to the research/literature and see whether that research topic has been covered. So that's just a a third technique that really isn't very structural I can't give you much direction on but I'm giving you license to say well you can't just think freely about this you don't need a specific systematic approach to research topic ideation. The only caveat is whatever ideas you come up with there make sure you return to the literature and see whether or not those research topics have been covered. Very often what you think is unique thinking on your part has actually been covered somewhere else already. So you've got to go back and validate those research ideas. Using one of these techniques or ideally a combination of these techniques you should be able to come up with a much more refined list of specific research topics - in other words we've gone from broad area of interest to a niche area of interest to a specific research topic and hopefully you've got a nice list of them. The next step is to take that list take those research topics and to turn them into specific research questions. The purpose of turning them into research questions is to again get really really narrowed down to get specific about okay so what are we actually asking so what does that look like let me give you an example. So let's say through the techniques that we just discussed you've come to one of your research topics being consumer trust in Robo advisors in the UK, for example. So if consumer trust in Robo advisors is your potential research topic, then you want to refine this even further to a set of specific research questions, and these might be (1) what are the key drivers of UK consumer trust in Robo advisors and (2) how do these drivers vary an impact between demographic groups. so notice how we've gone from even a research topic which is quite narrow already (consumer trust in in Robo advisors), with the research questions we go even more specific we say well what is what are the drivers of this trust and to how does that vary between demographic groups so it's getting really really specific about this is the topic and these are the specific research questions so you want to go through this process for whichever topics you've identified list out the topic and then list out perhaps two or three research questions that you're getting really really clear about what it is that you are going to be potentially focusing on. Then once you've got a good list of potential research topics and and their associated research questions, you are ready to move on to the final step which is evaluating the research topic ideas. So you finally got a good (hopefully a good) list of potential research topics and the associated research questions and now it's time to sit down and to evaluate these in a systematic fashion so that you can pick the most suitable topic. The key is to do this systematically, not to go and and just run with whichever one you are most drawn to because there are very important considerations that we haven't looked at just yet to assess which is the best potential topic. So let's have a look at that. For each research topic that you've got you're gonna evaluate them against the following criteria and I'd suggest that you create a little Excel spreadsheet and you assess a score for each of these metrics or for each for each research topic give a score to each of the following points. So the first one is originality so in other words is this topic sufficiently original at least according to to your University's requirements. Are you going to meet their criteria? This is why it's really important right in the beginning the first or second step was to understand the university's criteria and also the other dissertations that you looked at should give you an idea of originality requirements. The second thing you want to look at is importance. In other words is this research topic of real significance. So is it just a nice to know is it gonna make a difference in whichever industry its involved in? Is it significant or is it really just an intellectual curiosity? Again the requirement from the university side will vary and that's why it's really important to understand what what they require in terms of the importance of any given research topic. The next criteria to assess against is the availability of literature - in other words is there enough literature to base your investigation on but not too much that it's it's overdone what you're looking for here is a sweet spot. You don't want something that is so radically new that there isn't really enough literature to base a literature review on, which will be a requirement in your dissertation or thesis. So you want something that isn't too new but also that isn't overdone and if it if it is overdone you're gonna need a really good justification in terms of why your specific context makes it more worthwhile doing again. The next thing to evaluate on is data access in other words are you gonna have access to the data that you need to answer your key questions? Are you going to be able to get the information that you need? Very often this is overlooked and then you run down a path and end up really really stuck in the middle of your dissertation with with a data access issue. The next thing to consider is resource access. Do you have a need for things like lab equipment or do you have a need for additional resources as perhaps even a cash budget? Will you have access to that think about what other resources you might need in order to to really pull off the specific piece of research another consideration is your data collection capabilities? What I mean by this is if you're gonna do interviews, do you have the necessary people skills do you have a desire to certain interview people is that something is you comfortable with similarly if you're going to collect quantitative data do you do you have a way to do this to you I have the means to actually collect the information and the data that you need link directly to this is your analysis capabilities. Do you have the skills necessary to analyze the data whether that's qualitative or quantitative data and if not, will you get these skills or do you do you have the the desire to go and learn how to how to run the numbers for statistical analysis? Do you have the desire to learn software for a qualitative analysis? Think about these these capability restrictions that there are in place. Then importantly just personal attraction - so how excited are you by any given research topic - and will well addressing it add some value to your life to have solid add value to your career? If you're gonna use this as as part of a career move will it help you build a skill that you've previously wanted, or an area of knowledge that you wanted? So consider just the personal attraction that's essentially an overall component. So once you've scored all of your research topic ideas according to those criteria, tally them up and very quickly you'll be able to see what your top three potential research topics are. So you want to refine it down to top three - you might want to just do a little logic check on that see if your top three are actually research topics that you quite like and take your top three and the next step is to develop what what we call an elevator pitch. In other words a really quick summary of what it is that each research topic is about with the idea of selling someone on it. In other words think about selling a potential supervisor on approving your research. So you want to develop for each of these top three research topics, develop an elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is essentially just one paragraph covering a few important points which I'll discuss now. The first thing is what will the study be about? That just needs to be one sentence. The second point is why is this original? Again just one sentence. The third is why is this important? Again just one sentence. And the fourth is how you plan to answer this question - in other words what's your research design in one or two sentences - qualitative quantitative, rough idea of how you'll be collecting and analyzing the data. Once you've done that you're gonna have a paragraph for each research topic idea and that paragraph is really concisely going to convey the what, the why, and the how of each topic. Now what do you do with these little paragraphs that you create? Two things I would recommend the first thing is take that little paragraph and shoot it off to as many people as you can. Perhaps some friends and family perhaps some fellow cohort members and some fellow students and it gets some feedback regarding which research topic do they like the most, why do they like that, why is it appealing to them and and do they potentially see any problems in terms of the execution on that research. So that's gonna give you just a good layman's perspective on the research topic. Its going to give you some perspectives from people who are not specialists in the space. The second thing you can do (and a bit of a reward for having watched this far into the video) is you can take your elevator pitch and you can slap that straight into the comments below this video and we'll get one of our PhD qualified research specialists from Grad Coach to give you feedback on that idea. That's something we normally charge for, but we'll give you that absolutely free. Just drop it in the comments below. Importantly please it must be an elevator pitch it must be covering the things we've discussed - please don't put just half-baked research ideas in the comments. So do those two things and you should have some really good feedback that you can use to to to inform your thinking. Once you've got that feedback give some thought to what it all means to you and then make a decision. If you you've got your top three and your top three have made it through all those criteria that we've already gone through if you've been honest with yourself and if you've done the work chances are all three of them are pretty good research topic ideas. So pick the one that appeals to you most and stick with it. You don't need to doubt it, you don't need to second-guess it. If you've followed all the steps then you should have really solid research topics - so pick it and then get on to your research proposal. So there you have it a seven step process - the seven step process that we've used with hundreds of students at Grad Coach covering how to find and choose a really solid research topic for your dissertation or thesis. To recap on the seven steps: Step one is get a basic understanding of research understand what the research process is about understand the terminology used in research. Step two is to get a really solid understanding of your University's requirements. What do they require in terms of originality in terms of importance in terms of of restrictions ethics etc. Once you've got that, step three is to identify your broad interests. So this is just really starting at the top starting with a broad not not at all specific area of interest and the important thing to remember there is that it's something that you must have an intellectual curiosity about but not something that's emotionally charged for you. Once you've got those broad research interest areas identified you've got to move on to reviewing the past dissertations and then use those to understand how other people have narrowed these down into niche areas. So you're gonna go and narrow things down from broad to more niche. Once you've got your niche areas identified step 5 is to go and review the literature have a look at the literature in those areas, familiarize yourself with the current state of the research understand what is going on understand what the key arguments are understand what's agreed on what's disagreed on and then once you've done that you can go on and start identifying specific clear narrowed research topics and and research questions using the three techniques that we discussed. Once you've got your research topics identified you're gonna go and systematically evaluate them using the criteria that we discussed earlier and cut those down to your top three research topics. Get your feedback from your friends, get your feedback by by dropping your elevator pitch into the comments here and then make a decision about which one you're gonna go with. If you follow these seven steps and put in the time and effort to do them right there's no doubt in my mind that you will come out with a rock-solid research topic and then you can get on to writing your dissertation or thesis proposal. By the way we have covered how to write a thesis or dissertation proposal in another video so I'll link to that below this video. There you have it - how to find a good basket of research topics and then ultimately how to choose a research topics in seven pretty straightforward steps. As I've said feel free to leave any comments below the video, any questions below the video and most importantly if you've gone through the process and you have developed your rock-solid elevator pitches, then drop them in the comments and we'll give you free feedback on that. You can also book a free consultation with any one of our PhD qualified research specialists. That is very easy to do on the Grad Coach website and I'll include a link to that below this video. If you enjoyed the video please do give us a thumbs up, show us some love and if you would like you can subscribe to our YouTube channel Grad Coach TV. We do have loads of dissertation and thesis related content there, Same for the Grad Coach blog - I'll include the link below this video. So for today this is Grad Coach signing out.
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Channel: Grad Coach
Views: 200,384
Rating: 4.9547305 out of 5
Keywords: how to choose a dissertation topic, how to choose a research topic, how to choose a thesis topic, how to find a dissertation topic, how to find a research topic, how to find a thesis topic, dissertation topic, thesis topic, research topic
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Length: 38min 40sec (2320 seconds)
Published: Thu Dec 05 2019
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