As our article, Our top tip for finding a dissertation topic highlighted, the Limitations and Future Research section of journal articles are arguably the quickest and easiest way to find a possible dissertation topic at the undergraduate and master's level. After all, in this section of academic journals, researchers explain the limitations of their own research, as well as potential new lines of inquiry that other researchers could explore. However, the trick is to know how to take the research limitations and/or future research suggestions in these journal articles and turn them into a potential topic idea for your dissertation. In this article, we explain how to achieve this.
Knowing how to turn a research limitation or future research suggestion into a potential dissertation topic is simply a matter of following a few steps. Since these steps are slightly different depending on whether you are creating a topic idea from a research limitation or a future research suggestion, we have divided this article into two parts:
Using research limitations as a basis to come up with a dissertation topic idea
Using future research suggestions as a basis to come up with a dissertation topic idea
To use research limitations as a basis to come up with a dissertation topic idea, you first need to have read a journal article on a topic that interests you. Having read this journal article, focus on the section at the end of the article, often called Research Limitations (or Discussion/Future Research), where the authors criticise their own work. Now, follow the four steps below:
Authors of good journal articles will highlight a number of limitations in their work. These include:
An inability to answer your research questions
Theoretical and conceptual problems
Limitations of your research strategy
Problems of research quality
Within the Research Limitations section, we go into more detail on each of these types of research limitation. Reading these articles will help you to identify what types of research limitation are being discussed by the authors in the journal article you are interested in.
Whilst dissertations are rarely "ground-breaking" at the undergraduate or master's level (and are not expected to be), they should still be significant in some way. When coming up with a dissertation topic idea, you need to be able to explain how your idea is significant. Your research may be significant in one or a number of ways. It may:
Capitalise on a recent event
Reflect a break from the past
Target a new audience
Address a flaw in a previous study
Expand a particular field of study
Help an individual, group, organisation, or community
Since this section of the article deals with using research limitations as a basis for coming up with a dissertation topic idea, just two of these perspectives on research significance are relevant: (a) the ability to address a flaw in a previous study; and (b) the desire to reflect a break from the past. Let's take each in turn:
The journal article you are reading may have: (a) a flaw that the authors identified after the research was completed; and/or (b) a flaw that they had not anticipated in the first instance. When we use the word flaw, we do not mean that the limitation is necessarily disastrous to the study that was carried out. We use the word loosely to highlight that any academic reviewing the journal article you were interested in could identify a particular factor as a limitation.
A flaw identified after the research was completed
When you complete a piece of research, it is easy to look back and recognise flaws. A common problem is the inability to collect sufficient data and/or information. Sometimes this is because your sample size was too small.
For example, imagine you were interested in the career choices of university students at a university with 20,000 students (your population). You hoped to interview (or survey, observe etc.) 100 people (your sample), but in the end you only managed to get 30 people to take part in your research. As a result, you are no longer sure whether you collected sufficient data and/or information to answer your research questions with confidence. In other words, you are not sure whether your smaller sample of just 30 people adequately reflects the population of 20,000 students you were interested in studying. Limitations like this are very common.
A flaw that was not anticipated in the first instance
Sometimes researchers use the Research Limitations section of a journal article to reflect on a flaw that they did not anticipate in the first instance. These kinds of flaws may become evident during the research process when the data is being collected and/or analysed. This makes it much more difficult to anticipate such flaws in the first place.
For example, imagine that you had used a survey to examine the career choices of students at a university of 20,000 students (discussed above). For the most part, the survey contained closed questions. These are questions where the potential response to a question is pre-determined (see the example below):
Question
What factors influence your choice of career?
Options [tick all that apply]
Career prospects
Nature of the work
Physical working conditions
Salary and benefits
Other
If Other, please state what this is..........
Let's assume that these potential responses are based on your reading of the literature on career choices. However, since we do not want to miss out any options that we have not thought about or that are not in the literature, we include an open question, labelled Other. Respondents can write anything in the space provided.
When we analyse our data, we find that career prospects and salary and benefits were the main factors influencing career choices amongst the university students. However, we also see that a large proportion of respondents had entered factors into the Other option. The idea that people wanted flexible working arrangements was mentioned by most of these respondents. Whilst today we should have included this option in the survey (i.e. flexible working) because it is often mentioned in the literature, if we went back 20 years, this would not have been the case. Therefore, imagining that we were doing this research 20 years ago, we may have missed out an important option in the initial data collection process. Since the literature had not focused on flexible working as an important factor influencing career choices at the time, such a flaw (i.e., missing out flexible working arrangements as an option in the survey) may not have been anticipated when creating the survey.
Whether the flaw you are trying to address was anticipated by the authors of the journal article you are interested in or not, the important point is that addressing such flaws in previous studies is a way that your research can be significant. It can help to justify your choice of dissertation topic.
Breaking from the past simply means that you want your dissertation to adopt a different approach to the way that previous research was conducted.
The journal article that you are reading will have followed a particular research strategy. The choice of research strategy adopted by the authors is important because it guides the entire dissertation process, from the choice of research design, research methods, data analysis techniques, and so forth [see the section on Research Strategy for an introduction to these components of research strategy]. Since the choice of research strategy is so important in guiding the dissertation process, breaking away from the research strategy adopted by the authors of the journal article you are interested in can make your dissertation significant.
To illustrate this point, let's reflect on the example we just used where we were interested in examining the career choices of students at a university of 20,000 students. This study was guided by a quantitative research design and the use of survey methods. Therefore, a survey was constructed based on the literature, which contained mostly closed questions. For example:
Question
What factors influence your choice of career?
Options [tick all that apply]
Career prospects
Nature of the work
Physical working conditions
Salary and benefits
Other
If Other, please state what this is..........
The potential flaw with the study was that potential options, such as flexible working arrangements had been missed out of the list of options. Such options had been missed out (i.e., not anticipated in the first instance) because they were not prominent in the literature. So the question arises: How can this potential flaw be addressed by breaking from the past?
Let's imagine that instead of using a quantitative research design, we used a mixed methods research design instead. This would involve a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Rather than relying on the literature alone to come up with the list of options for our survey questions, we could have started the research process with interviews (i.e., a qualitative, primary research phase). By interviewing a sample of the students at the university, we could have first found out all (or most of) the factors that students thought about when being asked: What factors influence your choice of career? This would ensure that our list of options to be included for this survey question was more comprehensive. The options that were included would not have only been based on a review of the literature on career choices, but also a qualitative, primary research phase.
By using a mixed methods research design instead of a quantitative research design, you could have highlighted how (a) your dissertation broke from the past and (b) why it was significant as a result of this.
So you need to look at the journal article you are interested in, identify all of the types of flaws in the Limitations and Future Research section, and then try and identify how these research limitations and aspects of research significance are connected in some way. For example, if the authors stated that they had a low response rate, this may indicate that their sample size was too small (or at least lower than they had hoped for). If this was the case, and the authors suggested that this was a major problem (or you feel it could have been a major problem), you could argue that addressing this flaw is one way in which your dissertation topic could be significant. Taking the second example that was presented, if the authors of the journal article you were interested in highlighted problems that could be associated with their choice of research design (e.g., quantitative vs. mixed methods research design), this could illustrate the significance of a study addressing this particular flaw in research design.