Choosing a dissertation topic

General Guidelines

·        Make it interesting to you so you can maintain motivation.

·        Make sure the project is going to be supported by the host organisation.

·        Spend time defining and refining the topic.

·        Check with your supervisor and colleagues that the project is feasible.

·        Talk about your proposed topic with other students and staff.

·        Your supervisor is an important source of help.

·        Consider any ethical issues in your project.

·        Consider access and confidentiality of data.

·        Consider issues about reporting (who sees the dissertation or associated reports).

Your topic needs to relate to management. It may be a new topic to you or alternatively you may develop something you have worked on earlier in the programme, on a module assignment, or an elective you have studied.  Whatever your choice, your dissertation must be a significant piece of research work and must satisfy the requirements for a dissertation.  What you do should be relevant to contemporary practice, but you also need to demonstrate that you have reviewed, critiqued, applied, and developed contemporary academic thought.

For some students the problem they address may be chosen, by themselves or their sponsors, to address a specific issue of concern for their organisation.  Even if this is the case you will still need to think about how you approach that issue in such a way as to meet the requirements for a dissertation, and what research questions that involves.  If you have more scope as to what to investigate, you need to start thinking about potential areas of interest.  Selecting a topic is obviously very important, and it can be one of the most difficult aspects to doing the dissertation.  Since you will have scope to refine and develop your thinking throughout the dissertation process, try not to worry unduly at this stage whether you have chosen the perfect topic for you.  Equally, don’t feel that you have to commit once and for all to something, or rule out the possibility of studying something more interesting.

Getting Started

In thinking about your starting point for finding a topic, it may be helpful to consider some of the questions below:

Contextually specific

·        Is your organisation, or the place where you are going to conduct your research facing any particularly pressing problems, that could be addressed in a dissertation?

·        More widely, are there issues facing the sector in which you work that you could explore during a dissertation?

Career enhancing / Job specific

·        Can you think of a subject where, if you were to become more knowledgable, it would improve your career prospects?

·        More specifically, is there a problem relating to your job that you would find interesting to investigate?

Academically interesting

·        Can you examine any theory or model that you found intriguing, challenging or feel is highly appropriate to your context?

·        Is there an area of practice that you feel is currently under-researched and there is scope for further investigation – somewhere you can contribute to the literature?

Of course these are not mutually exclusive and at first you are likely to be thinking in very broad terms about topic choice.  You do need to read early, and frequently to arrive at a good sense of the potential contribution you can make.  Your thoughts are likely to change or develop as you do this, and as you find more out about the practical problems you will face in carrying out research.  Even so, during the course of reading, and thinking about practical issues, it will really help if you have in mind something concrete: a specific issue, context or concept.  This will provide focus and help you be clear about what you are doing.

Research Questions

As you start looking at the relevant literature, thinking about your skills and interests, and the context for your study, your thoughts about what your dissertation topic are will become clearer.  During this process, it can help to think about how you can break down your topic into specific research questions.  These should be ones that you seek to answer, or address during the course of your dissertation.  ‘Research questions’ does not mean the specific questions you would ask during an interview, or in a questionnaire.  Instead you should keep in mind what is the nature of your contribution:  what questions do you ask, how do you answer them, and how does this fit in with the requirements for a dissertation.

For example, you might be interested in the broad HRM/OB problem of why people in your organisation leave their jobs and go somewhere else.  So, the overall research topic could be something like ‘Employee turnover at XYZ council’, or ‘Employee turnover in local government: the case of XYZ council’.

Nested within this topic are some specific research questions that you would want to explore.  Here are some examples:

1.      What does the existing literature tell us about why people leave jobs in local government?

2.      How does research into this topic at XYZ council inform the literature?

3.      What things could be done to improve management of turnover at XYZ council?

4.      What things could be done to improve management of turnover in local government?

1 is theoretical – the literature review section.

2 is empirical (perhaps a case study, interviews or a questionnaire) – your methods and findings sections.

3 and 4 involve considering the implications: for your organisation; and showing how you have made a wider contribution – your discussion, recommendations, conclusion sections.

It will take some time of course to formulate these questions, because you will learn whilst you read, and once you begin to carry out your research.  You could have more or fewer questions than the ones above, but keeping these in mind will help to organise your thoughts and structure your research.  As the ones above are, try to keep your questions brief.

Aim for clearly formulated research questions, which are ‘good’ questions, by which is meant:

·        feasible (consider: access, your skills, resources available, ethical issues)

·        interesting (to you at the very least)

·        will lead to a contribution (adds to the literature, and understanding of a context)

·        symmetrical (make sure whatever you find, you’ll be able to tell a story – you could come unstuck if you set out to prove or find something and you don’t).

The Nature of Your Research Topic

It could also help you to consider the kinds of research questions you are asking, and by extension, the nature of the research topic that you are going to be pursuing.  This is sometimes expressed using the following three categories: exploratory, descriptive and explanatory.

Exploratory research involves gathering information and developing ideas about a relatively under-researched problem or context.  The value of exploratory research could be that it clears the ground for other kinds of research, or that it throws up interesting differences and comparisons between more well-studied topics, and those that are less well-studied.  The prime purpose is to develop understanding in an area that is little understood.  Since ‘exploratory research’ implies there is less of a basis from which to conduct research, and that a given area is not well understood, it is more appropriate to carry out this kind of research using qualitative methods.  Though one might develop hypotheses, this kind of research would not involve testing particular hypotheses.  In the scope of a dissertation, it could be quite difficult to pursue a research question that is exploratory, since there is less scope to build on the work of others.  You would also need to know a body of literature quite well before you could demonstrate that what you were doing was in some way original or new, and that you could justify spending time as an ‘explorer’.  It might also be harder to justify recommendations.

Unsurprisingly, descriptive research involves describing a problem, context or a situation.  This is a feature of exploratory research as well of course, however descriptive-type questions are generally more structured, and more reliant on prior ideas and methods.  You would more usually be describing what was happening in terms of pre-existing analytical categories, or relying on other ideas in some way.  The basis for investigation might be a body of ideas in a given field (local government), or related area (public sector management), and it could be the case that you develop hypotheses and explanations for what is going on.  This type of study could be suited to either qualitative or quantitative methods: for example a case study is a descriptive piece of research; but statistics and numerical data can also be used to describe.  A failing of some descriptive research can be that it leaves the reader thinking ‘so what’.  To avoid this, you would need to show how your in depth description of what was happening somewhere had wider implications.

Explanatory research can be thought as being concerned with causes.  The focus here is on seeking and providing or evaluating an explanation between two or more phenomena, ‘low pay causes people to leave’, or ‘poor management practices cause people to leave’ for example.  Explanatory research typically seeks to identify and explain a causal relationship that is substantively important or meaningful.  In this kind of research, people typically develop hypotheses to be tested (in light of the extant literature) and then see whether the data they have collected can be called on to support or refute those hypotheses.  This type of approach is more likely to employ quantitative methods, typically a survey, but one could also seek explanatory type research using case study, or observational data.

Inextricably, considering these issues involves giving some thought to epistemological questions (e.g. can we meaningfully seek causal explanations in the social science) but this broad summary should be a basis for thinking about your topic and the questions.

Finally...

Try to keep in mind these goals:

·        A title for your dissertation

·        Key, good research questions

·        Being able to summarise your (expected) dissertation in two sentences

All these help with managing and focus of the dissertation.

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