ABSTRACT
As both a relatively young discipline, and one that draws upon a number of other disciplines, the field of public administration is open to a number of factors that impact its research agendas. The process through which research agendas emerge in the field is shaped by public administration’s interdisciplinary nature, and the fact that many of the questions selected for exploration are framed by political, social, and economic occurrences at a given time. Because of the wide-scale public impact of the field, understanding both the problems and the questions public administration researchers ask is of utmost importance.
