Getting started

Dissertation is looming before you – how do you come up with an idea? Hopefully, you have a general idea of what topic you are interested in. I suggest beginning by reading some recent review articles on the topic. How do you find these? Go to the Walden library and go to Psychology/ PsycInfo. Do a search on your topic idea and include the search term "review." This will bring up articles that have extensive literature reviews. Pick a couple of recent ones to read. 

After you have read your articles, you should have a decent idea of the state of the topic area. Now get out your research notebook (don’t know what that is? See my 4/22/13 post), and write down questions you have about the topic area. Let's pick a problem area as an example and think about it- let's say Celiac disease is a topic you are interested in. This is a disease in which people cannot handle eating gluten (e.g., wheat, barley, rye); it requires a very restrictive and closely monitored diet. Some questions that you might have after reading the literature might be: who are the people with this problem? How do they feel about having this disease? How do they cope with the day to day issues of it? How does the family deal with it? 

In this example, all of my questions suggest the need for a qualitative study, in which patients or family members are interviewed about the disease. The next step is to go back to the library and see if any qualitative studies have been done, looking at these issues. Let's say, for the sake of argument that there has been a couple of qualitative studies with adults with the disease. Read the articles and look at their suggestions for future research. You might decide that in interesting area would be to look at adolescents coping with the disease (imagine going out with your friends and having to quiz the food preparation).  

To summarize my approach – I picked a general area of interest and read some review articles in the area. Then I listed some possible research questions and saw that it was leading me in a particular research method direction (qualitative study). I then did more library research in the topic using that research method. I would naturally continue to read in the topic area and widen the databases used. 

Next time I will post an updated blog index.  Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu