Where to Start?

You are ready to begin your dissertation… but 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 how to come up with a topic. I suggest taking a couple of minutes and writing down what classes you liked, articles you have found interesting, and general topics which have interested you in your educational career. For the moment do not think about it in terms of doing a project; just consider things which have interested you. Let us say 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

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, here is mine: How about partner adaptation to cervical cancer? This makes me wonder if anyone has looked at 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 (a data set that someone else has already collected) available on any of these topics (I should check out any institutional secondary data resources, which may be available)?

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 the articles paying particular attention when they talk about "future research" or "research needed". See if anything sounds interesting to you and follow it up with more articles, paying attention to the methods they use. I hope you will have at least a general direction by this point! Once you think you have found a gap in the literature, do searches to make sure no one has done the study you are considering. Write your search terms, databases used, and articles you found helpful in your research journal (more on this in the next chapter). 

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