Academic research is an ongoing conversation between scholars. To understand how your dissertation might fit into that conversation, you first need to understand the scholarly landscape in your field.
Explore scholars and organizations that are working on similar issues to what you want to explore. What general topics and themes do they study? How do they study those topics? What populations and settings do they study? Understanding what others have studied before helps you develop a topic that is unique, feasible, and relevant to your field and to broader society.
Once you have an idea of a general topic for your dissertation, you will need to start an exploratory literature search process. See the tips below for narrowing a research topic into something that is searchable.
Choosing the right topic is the key to research. If your topic is too big, or too broad, you'll find too many articles. If your topic is too narrow, you won't find enough information for your assignment.
Watch this video to learn more about how to brainstorm and create a research question and topic:
The results of your exploratory search should give you a solid idea of what research has been done in your field and on your topic. After reading through lots of articles on your topic, you've probably noticed that many of them include a Discussion section where they outline some of the weaknesses of their study, or highlight what further research could be conducted in light of their results. Paying attention to these parts of papers in your field is a great way to get ideas for your own research! Your dissertation could directly address the suggested further research, or you could design a study that remedies the weaknesses in previous studies.
Pay attention also to what you're not finding as you conduct your literature search. Are there populations or settings that are not studied in the literature? Are there any theories that you don't see applied to certain populations or settings? Are there topics that haven't been studied in years? These are all good indications that there is a gap in the research landscape that you could fill with your dissertation.
How will you go about answering your question?
Think about the research methodologies you've studied in your program. Can your question be answered best by one of them? How would you go about designing a study using that methodology? Do you have the necessary tools and skills to use that methodology? If not, do you have a plan for how you could gain that knowledge and skillset?
Considering how you might ultimately answer your research question early on gives you plenty of time to tweak the question to more effectively study it.
You probably won't land on the perfect research question right away. Talk with your instructors, dissertation committee, and classmates to see what they think of your topic and question. They probably will have unique insights into your topic and how you can study it. They can help you determine whether your scope is manageable for the project.
Talking with a librarian can also help you with your literature search process. Reach out to library@csp.edu if you need help designing an effective literature search.
