Where to start?

You are nearly ready to start dissertation where do you start?? First, you need a project idea, but how do you find one? Some students know very early in their program what they want to explore in their dissertation; however, if you do not know, here are some ideas as to come with a topic. I suggest taking a couple of minutes and writing down what areas of psychology, classes you have taken, articles that you have found interesting, and general topics that have interested you in your educational career. For the moment don’t think about it in terms of doing a project, just consider things that have interested you. Let's say that you came up with the following list: 

Liked Women's Health class

Liked Changing Health Behavior class

Interested in pregnancy related topics

Interested in topic of cervical cancer

Really found this article interesting: Manne, S.; Ostroff, J.; Fox, K.; Grana, G.; Winkel, G. (2009). Cognitive  and social processes predicting partner psychological  adaptation to early stage breast cancer. British Journal of Health Psychology, 14(1), 49-68. 

Now just do some free association. How about partner adaptation to cervical cancer; which makes me wonder if anyone has looked partner adaptation to testicular cancer. I wonder if people have looked at cervical cancer and pregnancy? Is this an issue? What kinds of programs are there for partner support for health related issues? I wonder if I could do a program evaluation of one of them? Is there any secondary data available on any of these topics (I should go to the Walden's research center/Research Resources and look at the databases in ICPSR)? 

Ok we now have a few directions to explore. Go to the library and do some searches on the various topics- include the word "review" in your search terms, only look at the last 5 years. This will bring up recent literature reviews on the topics. Read through the articles paying particular attention when they talk about "future research" or "research needed". See if anything sounds interesting to you, follow it up with more articles, paying attention to the methods they use. Hopefully, you will have at least a general direction by this point!  

Next time I will talk about how to start writing about the topic. 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