ABSTRACT
Try to cultivate an interest from one or more of the courses you have completed prior to beginning the thesis or dissertation. Think about all of the term papers you’ve written and decide whether one of these could ultimately be expanded into a thesis or dissertation topic. When teaching at the graduate level, I encourage students to think about their thesis continuously as they go through the program. I inform them that, from my own experience of over 25 years of teaching and advising students, those who frequently have the greatest 25difficulty getting through the thesis or dissertation are individuals who come to the thesis seminar the first day without a clue regarding a topic. Second, once a student develops a real interest in a topic (usually when he/she is somewhere in the middle of their coursework), the next crucial element is to narrow the scope so that collection of primary data is feasible. Once the research topic has been narrowed and clearly defined, the student needs to decide what kind of research method(s) would be most appropriate for the collection of data. Usually, this means that a course in research methodology needs to be completed early in the graduate program so that a student becomes familiar with when and how to use various methods such as surveys, field studies, experiments, content analyses, focus groups, etc. While statistics courses are often seen as abstract and of questionable value for the future careers of many students, a basic understanding of quantitative techniques is needed in order for the student to successfully finish the data analysis chapter, which always appears near the end of a thesis or dissertation.
