After we pass our comprehensive exams, we are apt to breathe a huge sigh of relief. Whew. Glad that’s over! But the hardest part of our doctoral journey is just beginning, and we may not even know it. I’m talking about choosing our dissertation topic.
Many doctoral students know what they want to study from the moment they enroll in graduate school. They have a passion for something, maybe secondary student dropout rates, or racial discrimination in the workplace, or factors causing gender inequality in pay rates. In my experience, righteous indignation over a perceived social injustice is a red flag that you are headed toward a cliff.
Why? When we are immersed in our passionate quest, we aren’t thinking like scholars. We are thinking like outraged citizens, or concerned parents, or vociferous workers. And that is a clear sign we have stepped out of our role as objective researchers.
Yes, your passion should guide you, but it should not rule you.
Here are four questions to help you choose your dissertation topic. Consider each one of these questions carefully. Take time to do some research. The time you spend now to clarify your topic will pay off handsomely as you move through your dissertation milestones.
- What is your program of study?
- What interests you?
- What problem needs addressing?
- Where is there a gap in the literature?
Let’s look at each question more closely.
What is your program of study?
Your program of study will obviously narrow the scope of your topic, but perhaps less than you think. It may seem obvious to you that your program is your first parameter, but it almost presented a problem for me. I wanted to understand academic quality in for-profit vocational colleges. This could have been considered a topic best suited to an Education major. However, I was enrolled in the School of Business and Technology Management. I had to make it explicitly clear that I was interested in the problem of academic quality from a marketing and a management point of view, not from an educational point of view.
Looking at a broad issue through the lens of your program area could reveal some fertile dissertation topics.
What interests you?
Within your program of study, what have you read or learned so far that interests you, even marginally? Make a list… a long list. Brainstorm anything that comes to mind. Here is where you should start going back through the articles and books you have used in your courses. (Keep them available, because you will need them later.) Skim the tables of contents and headings. Look at diagrams. Ask yourself, “What more would I like to know about this issue?”
When you have a long list of interesting ideas, organize them into three categories: Passionate, Moderately Interested, and Mildly Interested. If there are any items on your list that are not even the slightest bit interesting to you, cross them out. Now you have three categories of ideas that you could evaluate further. Focus on the Moderately Interesting list first. What you want is a topic that is interesting, but is neither boring nor all-consuming. Highlight the ideas that seem unique.
Be open to expanding beyond or away from your original plan.
What problem needs addressing?
What problems can you identify that are worth studying? There could conceivably be a billion items on this list, but realistically, you should probably focus on problems that relate, even if only slightly, to your program of study. I found my topic in the news: Academic quality in for-profit career colleges was being hotly debated after an undercover government investigation.
Look through the titles of articles from several journals published in your field. You can glean a pretty good idea of what problems are getting attention. Narrow your list of problems to things you are at least moderately curious about. Think, too, about the scope of a problem: Some problems only matter to a few people, some matter to the entire planet. What you want is something in between. If you want to study a planet-sized problem, you can; just do it through a human-sized lens.
Where is there a gap in the literature?
The easiest way to locate a topic to study is to read the recommendations for further research made by authors of articles in your field. You will find them at the end of any article. Many of those research recommendations are deep enough to provide a dissertation-worthy topic.
Go through a stack of articles (figuratively speaking, since your search will be online. You aren’t wasting resources printing articles, right?) Make a list of potential topics. While you were researching potential problems to study, you may have found that there is little or no literature on a certain issue. This may identify a gap.
But just because there is little or nothing written on a topic doesn’t mean it’s worthy of doctoral-level study. Also, if you try to research a topic that is so cutting-edge that nothing has been published about it yet, you will find yourself too far ahead of the curve. In the area of for-profit higher education, I found many opinions, but not much peer-reviewed literature. In objective research, opinions don’t count.
To find out if the problem is over- or under-studied, use a tool like Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Science/Web of Knowledge, which should be available through your university library. You can also use Google Trends to find out how a topic is trending in Google searches. Use keywords to search various topics in online databases with search tools like ProQuest, EBSCOhost, SAGE, and the Taylor & Francis Group. After some searching, you will start to get a sense of what has been well studied and whether interest in a topic is growing or fading. Keep in mind that even a well-studied topic can be explored through a fresh approach: think visual methodologies, like video, rich pictures, or photographs.
The more you read, the more you will be able to discern potential topics. After a while, topics will begin to occur to you in your dreams. You will think of interesting ideas in the shower, or when you are jogging, or when you are watching a commercial between episodes of Breaking Bad.
Now let’s put it all together. Look for the ideas that appear on two or more of your lists. These should be topics that present interesting problems that are in your program and have not been overly studied. In other words, the intersection of the four questions. If you use this method as a guideline to choose a topic, you will be well positioned to prepare your first milestone, the Concept Paper.
Good luck!
