Suggestions for Choosing a Dissertation Topic
1. Consider an area of strong personal interest, to keep you motivated. Discuss areas of common interest with your advisor.
2. Consider an area in which you have some experience, to help you develop important questions, and interpret findings.
3. Consider an area in which you have studied the literature. This will help shape your question and research design.
4. Don’t feel like your proposal, like Athena, should spring full-blown from your head. Find a basis for your proposal (both topic and methodology) from the literature. Study (or re-study) tertiary and secondary sources in the area to help refine your thinking. Avoid position or opinion papers unless they are very closely tied to research.
5. Identify primary sources in your area of interest. Study these, and find one that seems incompletely studied, that suggests (perhaps in the Discussion section) areas for future research.
6. Find a study that provides a model for methodology. This can help you develop your own proposal, and provide a "precedent" to support your proposal. ("This is the type of design/analysis that was employed in the Smith and Sanchez (1996) investigation.")
7. The best topics/proposals build directly from the literature (although they may be inspired by personal interest/experience), and add a "next step" to what has already been discovered.