Turning a research limitation or future research suggestion into a potential topic idea

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

Using research limitations 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:

STEP ONE
Identify the types of research limitation discussed by the authors

Authors of good journal articles will highlight a number of limitations in their work. These include:

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.

STEP TWO
Understand the potential relationship between these research limitations and what makes a dissertation topic significant

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:

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 ability to address a flaw in a previous study

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.

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.

The desire to reflect a break from the past

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.

Moving forward...

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.

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