"I've gone through a lot of the literature, and it seems that all the good research topics have been used up. What's left for me to work on?"

One long-honored tradition in academia is that of professors assigning thesis and dissertation topics to their advisees instead of having students create topics of their own. Or, if faculty supervisors don't actually assign topics, they may at least suggest what their advisees might study. There are both advantages and disadvantages to assigned research problems. Perhaps the most obvious advantage of adopting a professor's proposal is that you ensure that your mentor enthusiastically endorses your project. Assigned topics are often part of a faculty member's own research program, with each student's topic representing one piece of a complex puzzle the professor is trying to solve. And if the research is funded by a grant, you may get paid for working on the portion that involves your thesis or dissertation. If a report of the research is published in a journal or in conference proceedings, you may also be credited as a coauthor. Or your mentor may acknowledge your participation in a footnote to a journal article or book chapter. Furthermore, accepting a topic that is part of someone else's research not only relieves you of hunting for a research problem, but it may also lighten your burden of devising a design, creating data-gathering instruments, and interpreting the results. Those tasks may already have been performed by the professor or his staff. However, depending so heavily on others for a research problem robs you of the opportunity to work out such matters for yourself. So, from the standpoint of gaining experience generating and solving problems on your own, an assigned topic that is accompanied by assigned research procedures may get you your degree with less pain, but it may not serve as the best preparation for future research you wish to pursue on your own.

SOURCES AND KINDS OF PROBLEMS

There certainly is no shortage of worthy research problems if you know how to hunt. Perhaps the best way to generate problems is to cultivate the habit of critical reading and listening. This means constantly bringing questions to mind while you are poring over books and journals and while you witness lectures and discussions. The sorts of questions you pose identify the kinds of problems to investigate. Beyond critical reading and listening, a further source of topics is that of problems met on the job, either on your own job or someone else's. In order to illustrate how such search strategies work, the following examples demonstrate specific ways of using critical reading/listening and on-the-job problems for discovering suitable topics.

Critical Reading and Listening

Questions you ask about what you read or hear can concern (a) the significance or focus of an author's research topic, (b) the applicability of an author's results to other populations, times, or places, (c) a researcher's methods of collecting information, (d) ways data have been classified, (e) an author's theory of what causes events to occur as they do, (f) applications of theories, or (g) some combination of several of these matters.

Topic significance or focus

An article you read or a lecture you attend may make you wonder: "Isn't that just trivia? Who would ever take that seriously? What's the importance of studying such stuff?" But can you then think of some way the topic could be recast to render it worth investigating? If so, you've generated a potential research topic.

Results applicability

In all research, the information an investigator collects encompasses only a limited number of people, objects, activities, or events. For instance, a case study may focus on a single mentally gifted girl in Bavaria. A questionnaire survey may involve responses from 1,022 Labor Party members in Liverpool, England. An ethnographic investigation may focus on family structure in two Central American Mayan villages. An achievement-testing program may involve 37,000 students from schools in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. A historical account may trace the evolution of weaponry in Europe during the period 1700-1900.

Sometimes researchers are content to restrict their summaries and interpretations to only those people, institutions, and events they have directly studied. But authors frequently view such people and events as representatives of a broader class of phenomena, so the conclusions drawn from this sample are cast as generalizations applying to other phenomena that were not directly investigated--to other gifted children, to other Labor Party members, to other Indian villages, to other Asian students, or to other nations' weaponry during other time periods. Consequently, when you read such studies, you may wonder whether conclusions reached in a given context actually hold true for other places and times than those directly investigated. You may, therefore, choose to devise a replication study, adopting the same methods of gathering information that were used in the original investigation but applying those methods to a different sampling of people, institutions, or events. In doing so, you are conducting comparative research, identifying the likenesses and differences between the results of the original study and your own.

Two questions to guide your reading and listening as you search for replication possibilities are these: "Would the same conclusions result from studying a different sample of people, institutions, events, or time periods? What kind of sample might yield different results, and why?"

Methods of collecting information

Now, imagine that you have read four different studies in an academic journal, with those studies designed to answer the four questions in Table 4-1. In each investigation, the method of gathering data was the first of the alternatives listed in the table. Imagine, also, that you select one of these questions as your thesis problem, because you believe a different data collection procedure than the one used in the journal report would yield more informative results. Hence, for your project, you choose to answer the same question as the one in the published study, but you intend to adopt a different alternative for gathering information, or perhaps a combination of several alternatives. Consequently, the innovative contribution made by your thesis can be threefold. You will (a) introduce the academic community to your data collection technique, along with a description of its strengths and limitations, (b) show how the results obtained with your procedure compare with the results reported in the journal, and (c) offer your estimate of why the outcomes of the two studies were similar and/or different.

Questions that can direct your hunt for potential research opportunities that relate to information-gathering methods include: "Would the outcomes of the study that I'm now reading have been different if another data collection procedure had been used? In what way might the outcomes have differed? What other data collection procedure might I use that could produce more valuable, or at least different, results?"

Ways of classifying information

Each time you collect information to answer a research question, you must organize your data in a form that permits a description, analysis, and presentation of the results to your intended audience. This means you must adopt a system for classifying your information. Such systems are often referred to as typologies or taxonomies. Therefore, one way of finding a research problem can be that of substituting a scheme for classifying data that differs from the scheme used in an existing study. In effect, you produce a methodologically innovative thesis or dissertation.

For example, let's assume that you've read a report of people's attitudes about government controls over individuals' rights to own guns. The woman who conducted the survey had compiled opinions by means of interviewing respondents over the phone. She then reported her results in terms of (a) males versus females and (b) the strength and direction of each respondent's attitude in terms of four categories--strongly in favor of controls, somewhat in favor, somewhat opposed, and strongly opposed. However, when you read the study, you were dissatisfied with the interpretation of the results. You believed the work would have been far more valuable if a different system of classifying answers had been used. For instance, perhaps you would like to learn how respondents' attitudes about gun controls might be related to their (a) age, (b) level of formal education, (c) family status (married versus single, having children versus being childless), (d) occupation, (e) religious affiliation, and (f) gender. Therefore, in your own study, you plan to conduct a telephone survey in which you gather these six kinds of information about respondents when you ask their opinions of gun controls. Because an interpretation that can be drawn from the results of any research venture is constrained by the classification system used, you will be equipped to draw a more sophisticated, detailed set of conclusions than those drawn by the author of the published study.

Creating or revising theories

As suggested earlier, a theory in its most basic form is (a) a description of components, variables, or factors and (b) a description of how those components interact to (c) produce some outcome. Thus, theories are explanatory in that they propose how and why things happen as they do. In your survey of how other scholars have diagnosed problems in your field of interest, you may be dissatisfied with the explanations they offered, so you try to think of a better way-or at least an alternative way--to account for what occurred. In other words, you create a theory of your own or perhaps a variation of someone else's model. As a result, your thesis or dissertation takes the form of an explication, and perhaps an application, of your theory. The following two examples illustrate ways to invent a research topic of this sort.

This is the case of a hypothetical doctoral candidate interested in the fate of educational reforms. After reading a host of evaluations of educational reform efforts, large and small, he realizes that educational innovations often become bogged down, with some of them dying completely and others falling well short of the success envisioned by their proponents. Our doctoral student is particularly curious about how analysts account for reform failures. In other words, he's interested in theories of the success and failure of educational innovations. In his survey of the professional literature, he discovers a variety of factors that ostensibly account for the outcomes of educational change efforts, such factors as (a) available financial resources, (b) ways of presenting reform proposals, (c) the qualities of the people responsible for implementing a reform, (d) how many people will be affected by the innovation, and more. But one factor that he thinks has been overlooked is that of the risk people face when they are expected to participate in an educational change. Therefore, as his dissertation problem, he takes on the challenge of formulating a risk theory to explain, at least partially, why some educational innovations succeed better than others. His risk theory is founded on the following proposition:

The word risk means the likelihood that undesirable consequences will result from an action. The term educational risk estimate refers to people's expectation that they will suffer some sort of loss if they accept a role in an educational development project. Positive potential is the opposite of risk. Positive potential refers to the likelihood that people will experience personally desirable consequences from their participation in an educational reform. The amount of effort they will exert, either to support or to defeat an innovation, is determined by the relationship between the amount of risk and amount of positive potential they expect. Thus, a person's effort can be computed by the formula E=p-r. In other words, positive potential minus risk equals the effort an individual will expend.

Now, the student's task in developing his dissertation consists of (a) proposing variables or conditions that influence people's perception of risks and of positive potentials, (b) defending those variables with logical analysis and empirical evidence, and (c) explaining how such variables interact to determine (d) the amount of effort individuals expend to support or to thwart an intended educational change.

A second example illustrates one way a current social concern may motivate a student to focus her dissertation on theory construction. A doctoral candidate in anthropology, inspired by the recent feminist movement, reads accounts of women's roles in Dakota Indian societies and disagrees with several interpretations she finds there. She believes the writers have given too little attention to how Dakota women's social contexts and events in their lives have altered their roles over the 20th century. In an effort to correct these oversights, she plans to write a dissertation titled "An Ecological, Significant-Events Theory of the Evolution of Women's Roles in Dakota Cultures." The ecological aspect is based on the fact that Dakota women live in different social settings which influence the roles they assume. Some live on reservations, some in small towns, some in cities. Each of these environments affects women's roles in different ways. The significant-events aspect derives from the doctoral candidate's conviction that changes in women's roles are not properly understood in terms of time periods, such as one decade compared to another, but are best viewed in terms of events that alter women's lives. Thus, the dissertation will not be divided into chronological periods but, rather, into sequences of significant events. Some events are societywide, such as the extension of voting rights to women in 1920. Others are individual and come at different times in different women's lives, such as marriage, the birth of a child, or moving to a new location. Therefore, the two principal variables on which the student's theory is built are social contexts and significant events. Each of these variables will be divided into subcategories-(a) types of social settings in which women live and (b) types of events that significantly alter women's roles. To gather evidence about such matters, the researcher plans (a) to read accounts of life in Native-American cultures during the 20th century (particularly Dakota cultures) and (b) to spend the summer interviewing Dakota women--ones living on a reservation and ones living in a town or city.

The foregoing pair of examples illustrate only two approaches to theory building.

Applying theories

Whereas some students' projects involve creating theory, far more consist of applying existing theory to new situations. Here are four examples.

A seven-factor theory of intelligence: The model of human ability offered by Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner proposes that intelligence is not a singular, unified personal power which operates with equal effectiveness in all aspects of life. Instead, intelligence is more accurately conceived to be seven separate types of ability or intelligences that make their separate contributions to the adequacy of people's performance in life's endeavors. The seven focus on (1) use of language, (2) logical-mathematical analysis, (3) spatial representation, (4) musical thinking, (5) the use of the body to solve problems or to make things, (6) an understanding of other individuals (a form of social intelligence), and (7) an understanding of oneself ( Gardner, 1983, 1991).

An elementary school teacher, for her master's degree in education, creates activities for third-grade pupils that offer them practice in each of Gardner's seven types of intelligence. The aim of the activities is to a promote children's development in all seven types of aptitude. She entitles her project "A Frames-ofMind Curriculum for Third Graders."

Social-exchange theory: According to social-exchange theory, an individual who benefits from another person's acts is obligated to reciprocate by furnishing benefits to that person in turn. For many common types of social interaction, proper exchange is dictated by cultural tradition in the form of expectations about fairness, expectations that assume the form of exchange norms. Such norms are adopted in a culture as devices for coercing the parties in a social transaction to abide by what is considered fair. Members of society impose social pressure to encourage people to comply with those norms. The extent to which people abide by exchange norms influences their status in the society's hierarchy of respect, prestige, and power. "When fairness does not occur [that is, when the norms are violated], the norms compel the party who fails to be fair to accept a degradation of status in the group as compensation for the imbalance" ( Eve, 1986, p. 189).

A doctoral student in sociology intends to use social-exchange theory as the lens through which to study the rules that guide social interaction among members of a college sorority and among members of a college fraternity. The purpose is to discover (a) ways in which the sorority and fraternity are alike and different in their social-exchange attitudes and (b) individual differences among members within each of these societies in their social-exchange practices.

A theory of historical revisionism: This theory is founded on the proposition that whenever a radical change of political power occurs, the newly installed leaders seek to revise historical records in order to legitimatize their right to govern and to cast their organization and efforts in a highly favorable light.

As an application of the theory to a new case, and to reveal conditions that affect the way the theory manifests itself in a particular instance, a politicalscience student plans to inspect histories of Cuba written by Cubans prior to Fidel Castro's rise to power and ones written in Cuba after he became head of the government.

Site-based-management theory: A graduate student in the field of administration has become especially interested in the presently popular leadership theory that organizations should be flattened, shared decision making should be adopted, and power should be decentralized. The student has informally observed several organizations in which such site-based-management (SGM) theory has been applied; and she recognizes that, instead of reducing the power of the officially appointed head of the organization, the plan gives the head even more power. For example, the chief executive officer (CEO) can use site-basedmanagement advisory committees as scapegoats who are blamed when things go wrong in the organization. The CEO can also use consultation with advisory committees as a means of delaying the decision-making process. At the same time, all documents released by the CEO and the advisors laud site-basedmanagement theory, avoiding any mention of the theory's shortcomings. It is also apparent that such documents can function as historical revisionism, enabling CEOs and their close associates to remap the administrative territory in a way that serves their political interests. Consequently, the student decides that this contrast between site-based-management theory and its practice is a hot topic worthy of formal research.

Problems Encountered on the Job

Theses and dissertations are sometimes designed to solve problems met either in people's vocations or in their avocational pursuits. In the following discussion, the phrase on the job refers to either of these sources of research topics. The following examples illustrate a range of problems from on-the-job sources.

As a topic for her dissertation, a teacher on leave from an inner-city high school created a "next-step decision-making program" by which students who were doing poorly in school could follow a systematic plan for analyzing their difficulties and identifying (a) alternative next steps they might take and (b) the likely outcome of each alternative. Upon returning to her school for the upcoming academic year, the teacher intended to test the effectiveness of her model by trying out her scheme with failing students and, on the basis of the tryout, to evaluate and refine her program.

A political-science doctoral candidate, while serving as a volunteer in an election campaign for a state senator, planned to compare three methods of conducting preelection polls. The aim was to determine how accurately each method predicted the outcome of the coming election. His polling methods involved three different methods of choosing the sample of respondents who would be asked to tell for whom they planned to vote.

For his master-of-business-administration degree, an employee in a stock broker's office intended to analyze television advertisements sponsored by brokerage companies. His purpose was to learn (a) the kinds of investors at which different types of ads were aimed, (b) how ads sought to attract potential investors' attention, and (c) how the ads attempted to convince viewers that the company was trustworthy and efficient.

The daughter of the owner of a toy and hobby store planned to write her thesis on trends in the games that children and adolescents in the local region had played over the past half century. She would distribute questionnaires to local residents of different age levels, seeking information about (a) the games respondents had played during their childhood and adolescent years and (b) their knowledge of the terminology and rules associated with different games (such as marbles, hopscotch, run-sheep-run, Monopoly, baseball, soccer, Dungeons and Dragons, and Nintendo).

A student majoring in human development was asked her advice about which of two nursery schools was the more suitable for children ages two through four. Each school was identified with a local church--one with the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) and the other with the Christian Science center. This inquiry about the two preschools influenced the student to take--as her research problem--(a) analyzing likenesses and differences in the underlying philosophies of the two religious persuasions (by studying Joseph Smith The Book of Mormon and Mary Baker Eddy Science and Health), (b) identifying likenesses and differences in the conduct of the two schools (by observing ongoing activities in each school), and (c) comparing each school's philosophical foundation with its activities.

A high school counselor, pursuing a master's degree in clinical psychology, intended to trace, over a six-month period, the progress of four teenagers who were being treated for drug abuse. The purpose of the study was to delineate the interaction of factors in each youth's life that appeared to influence how well he or she recovered from drug use and initiated steps toward a constructive future.

While visiting an aunt, a sociology student attended a birthday party for the aunt's 90-year-old neighbor, a Black man who had served in the U.S. Army during World War II and subsequently played a key role in Martin Luther King's civil-rights movement. As various guests at the party described events in the man's career, the student recognized that the story of the neighbor's life would serve as an important document of African-Americans' efforts to assume their rightful place in American society. Therefore, as his thesis the student chose to narrate the tale of the neighbor's career against a background of political and social events during the past 90 years, casting much of the work in the neighbor's own words as tape-recorded during a series of interviews that the student would conduct.