Selecting a topic for your dissertation is not always easy. Some people are fortunate – an idea for a dissertation may pop into their mind immediately. For many, however, this is not the case, and you may need to be more systematic in your search for the dissertation question or topic that you wish to explore further. You may find that you have too few ideas, or too many.
You may have to do a great deal of thinking and background reading before you reach a decision about the topic in which you want to invest a lot of time and effort.
Our Top Tips
Talk to a member of academic staff at an early stage about your ideas. Let them know you just want to have a general discussion. (In many institutions, students are actively discouraged from approaching individual members of staff to ask them to act as a dissertation supervisor, so check the procedures in your institution before you do anything like this.)
Talk to other students directly or in a discussion forum.
Draw upon the unresolved questions and issues you had from other units/modules that you have studied or intend to study.
Use the reading and knowledge from these units to develop a dissertation question.
Use newspapers and other media to identify topical issues related to areas of social policy, politics, sociology, criminology, etc.
Become familiar with the search sources and support available, particularly within your own institution and via the Web, to find relevant critical and scholarly material.
Draw upon your own experience (as an employee, a parent, part of a campaigning group, a student, a patient and so on).
Scan the academic journals.
Think about a book you have found interesting.
Finding a topic for the dissertation
Inspiration can come from many places when looking for a dissertation topic.
The topic you select needs to be one that can be addressed in an appropriately academic manner within the time constraints of the dissertation.
Will the topic sustain your interest over the months to come?
Is the topic one which you can approach with analytic distance?
Is there an existing literature within which you can locate your work?
Is the topic one that you can research with the time and resources available?
Avoid too broad a topic
Avoid too broad a topic or one that is overly ambitious: it is better to find a thoroughly researched and argued answer to a small question than to fail to find the answer to one which is too big or diffuse.
Your main interest in the topic may be:
An area of social life.
A type of method that you would like to use.
A body of theory that you are interested in exploring.