MA thesis/dissertation advice
Picking a topic and narrowing it down
I’ve been looking through the internet today, to get some good advice to help me narrow down my MA thesis topic. I wrote it down in case someone finds it helpful:
“Begin by articulating why previous discussions of an idea or research topic you’re interested in are inadequate/incomplete in some way.”
“A large overarching idea isn’t a dissertation topic, its a research agenda. A dissertation topic is some specific piece of that puzzle.”
“The only bad choice is looking for more options instead of getting to work on what’s right in front of you.”
“Consider standard texts and well-known results related to your topic. What sucked about them? Be specific. If you had to be their authors, how would you set up your research on the same problems.”
“Reacquaint yourself with the work you were doing when you were the most enthusiastic.”
“If you are prone to perfectionism, you need to rein it in, or you will not finish.”
“We may define mastery in different ways, but I do believe you need to show that you are competent at investigating a particular research topic and at undertaking theoretical or empirical work that moves our understanding of a phenomena forward.”
“In-depth case study or an application of theory to a different data set could be an original contribution.”
“Am I trying to do more cases than needed to prove the hypothesis I’m testing or answer the research questions I’ve posited?”
Sources: http://www.raulpacheco.org/2017/07/narrowing-the-research-thesis-topic/
https://ask.metafilter.com/158878/How-to-get-excited-about-picking-a-dissertation-topic
https://ask.metafilter.com/244547/Teach-me-how-to-narrow-down-my-dissertation-topic
