Topic Development – Clear, Relevant, and Impactful

Hi! Constructing a new study from the ground up can be a daunting task, and it can truly be hard to figure out where to even start in this process. If you have watched our alignment video, or have learned about study alignment in your thesis or dissertation preparation courses, then you can probably see now that all of the core pieces of your study have to fit together. But, where does it make sense to start on all of this? You might have certain research questions that you want to ask, but how do you know that there is a legitimate need to ask those questions in your graduate research?

To clarify these points, what I will explain to you in this instructional video is how the topic development process works. This is your very first step — well, actually collection of steps — that will set you on the path to conducting a well-designed study that you can solidly justify as being necessary and important to develop knowledge or understanding in your field of research. We are called upon to assist quite often to help topic development for our clients’ dissertations and thesis research, and this video should help to clarify this major step of your study development greatly.

To start off our discussion of topic development, let’s begin with the most basic of questions: How do you identify a topic?

Identifying a topic that you can justify as important enough to shape your dissertation around is not a simple matter. It is not enough to simply state that you are curious about the topic, or that you think that investigating the topic might lead to interesting or helpful results.

For a successful study, your research topic needs to be three things: clear, contemporary, and compelling.

Demonstrating that your topic has these three essential qualities involves careful development of a research gap. This is the first goal of topic development, and one of the main reasons researchers seek out dissertation help. The research gap is a term that refers to something that is currently unknown within your discipline, which you must be able to demonstrate through a detailed presentation of the related research literature.

Now, let’s talk specifically about these three qualities. The first requirement of your topic is that it reflects a clearly stated gap in the literature.

“Clear” here has two meanings: First, it means that the language of the research gap must be precise. It’s important to note this doesn’t mean you should load up on jargon! Instead, you should use key terms as appropriate, to provide context for your reader.

Second, it means that the gap must, in terms of content, be specific. Another good word for this is narrow. This means that you have discovered and described a particular area of knowledge that is fairly limited in scope, and that invites a very specific type of study to get at the information that is as yet unknown or insufficiently explored.

Looking at our example, from the very first sentence:

So if we look at that example, in the very first sentence, we see language that is precise and narrow in content — in terms like patient-perpetrated violence, mental health workers, and then we see the latter term is further clarified (as that is a broad group) to in-patient clinicians.

When I say that this language is precise, what I mean is that it is easy to understand exactly which types or categories of people are of interest here — in-patient clinicians. Also, it is easy to recognize the exact type of behavior that is of interest — patient-perpetrated violence. It might also be helpful for you to consider how this might be phrased in ways that are unclear. Imagine that this section of the problem statement instead talked about the need to learn more about behavior of people with mental health disorders as exhibited toward clinicians. This would leave you wondering: What types of behavior? Which clinicians? In what type of setting?

The precision in terminology here is complemented by the narrowness of focus. Specifying your interest in violence as perpetrated by patients toward clinicians in in-patient settings makes it very clear to the reader what type of behavior is of interest and which specific types of people you are focusing on with regard to this behavior. This is what it means to develop clarity in your research gap.

That leads into the second main quality of a good research gap: that it is current.

You need to establish that your topic has not been sufficiently addressed by existing research–not research from 10 years ago, but research from right now (or as close as you can get). In other words, this is currently a topic that deserves further research, and you’re able to cite a good number of studies in your full problem statement (10 is a good goal here) to support this statement.

So turning back to the example, we see this, again, in the very first sentence, which cites multiple scholarly sources to support this claim, all of which have been published in the last five years.

So let’s check them out. Here we have sources from 2016, 2015, another from 2015, and then one from 2014.

It is perfectly fine if the topic has been of interest in the research literature for many years, but it is important to demonstrate that your own particular angle on the issue is something that is still considered a current priority.

Let’s consider, again, a scenario where the research gap was not of current concern. Maybe you’re concerned about the high frequency of assaultive behavior perpetrated by patients against in-patient clinicians, and you find a lack of current research related to the use of aversive therapies to treat such behavioral disorders in patients. You might find justification to investigate this type of behavior in these particular settings, but arguing for a focus on aversive therapies would be an uphill battle because these types of therapies are largely considered inhumane these days and are often banned.

So, your argument in favor of such a study based on a lack of recent research on these approaches would not really constitute support for a current research gap. This brings me to a vital point you must understand about the research gap: a simple lack of research on a topic does not equate with a solid research gap. Our dissertation consultants help so many novice researchers to address this issue, and it’s an important point to understand. A simple lack of recent research might mean that the topic is no longer of current relevance, or that there is no demonstrable need for study of the topic.

This is a big pitfall many of our clients make in developing their research gaps, and indeed we often shape our dissertation help around getting this hugely important step of the process just right. Before you can move on with writing and editing subsequent elements of your dissertation, it’s important that you have a solid gap.

Finally, moving on to the third essential attribute of your research gap, you need to be able to give a compelling reason why this topic should be studied.

Perhaps you don’t have a unicorn, but it will be difficult to prove that this is a problem for society as a whole. You might find this hole in your life deeply distressing, but it would be a challenge indeed to demonstrate that this topic has widespread implications–for your field, for your participants, and for society.

So, let’s carry this examination of what makes your research gap compelling back to our example.

The final segment of the problem statement reads: “mental health clinicians are still made victims, and troublingly, victimization leads to the same physical and emotional effects for this group as for the general population.”

What makes this so compelling? Well, you have already explained earlier in the problem statement that the majority of in-patient clinicians experience violent behavior as perpetrated by patients. Now, you are clarifying that although these clinicians are professionals, they are still human beings who are deeply affected by their experiences of victimization. They are physically harmed and might develop troubling psychological reactions as the result of being victimized on the job. This is clearly a problem worth paying attention to, as this problem is likely to continue without more informed intervention to prevent or respond to violent behavior in patients.

A huge part of Topic Development, then, is identifying that initial gap in the research that your specific study will address.

(And check out our video on Problem Statements for more on that!)

Identifying and substantiating a research gap can be a very difficult task for novice researchers to accomplish, which is why we’re called upon to provide dissertation help to develop a sound research gap quite often. If you find that you’re also having difficulty with this important step in developing your topic, give us a call or send an email to discuss the assistance we can offer.

I’ll just note, also, that we have special experience when it comes to the major online universities. We’re experts with the guidelines for each, and we’d love to share our insights with you!

This is especially the case for topic development supporting qualitative research studies. We are unique among data analytics companies in that we also specialize in providing comprehensive assistance with qualitative studies, from initial development and methodology to qualitative analysis and results!

Now, moving forward, once you have a research gap that is clear, current, and compelling, you can start to frame the other key elements of your study.

I like to think of this stage as developing the blueprint for your study, all of which must be aligned (see our video on alignment for how to draw this blueprint clearly!)

If the foundation is solid, it’s easy to continue to build on it as you develop your full dissertation chapters. This solid connection between the core elements of your study is what is referred to as alignment.

You should definitely check out our video on Alignment for more on this!

In working on your blueprint — or developing alignment — it’s helpful to focus on the core foundational elements (like the walls of the house), and then the supporting structure.

So here, the foundational elements are:

the purpose of your study, your specific research questions/hypotheses, the problem that motivates your study (which we’ve already talked about), and the theoretical framework that guides your research. As I describe in the alignment video, all of these next key features of your study need to flow logically from your research gap as explained in your problem statement, so that’s always the first thing. It is also very important to use consistent language throughout the different segments of this blueprint. Actually, we often hear that reviewers deny approval at this early stage, citing a need for dissertation editing, when really what is missing is alignment.

Let’s consider our example study here, to illustrate. For the purpose statement, you would need to retain your focus on the use of risk assessment in in-patient settings as a means of reducing violence as exhibited by patients. If you were to go off with a purpose that focused on in-patient clinicians’ beliefs about medication use to control patient behavior, that wouldn’t really be aligned with your problem, would it? Again, the alignment video provides much more information about how to achieve this correspondence between these different components of your study blueprint, and I hope you’ll give that a look.

Alright, once that blueprint structure is in place, and you have written a well-aligned purpose statement, theoretical framework, and research questions to go with your problem statement, then you can completely develop the nature of the study, the significance of the study, and then if you want you can start adding those key details that make a house a house–throw in some stairs, a shower, the kitchen sink, if you will.

In other words, you can then move forward with an initial overview of background literature, data collection/instrumentation, and your analysis plan.

Since eventually, you’ll have to carry out a study that addresses the research gap, you’ll also need to ensure that you can gain access to just the right data and with an idea of how you’ll accomplish that.

As you can see, many elements of your study must emerge logically from the methodological approach you select. This is why we recommend clarifying your methodological approach early in the process. You’ll see that it’s the floor of our little house!

Without a clear and well-reasoned choice of methodological approach, all of the subsequent work that you do to develop your purpose, RQs, and data collection plans might turn out to be a poor fit for your study. Of course, your methodological plans have implications for how you shape the research gap and broader problem statement. So, even though identifying and developing your research gap is the first major step in topic development, it’s good to have a basic understanding of what types of problems can be suitably examined through qualitative research and analysis versus quantitative studies that employ statistical analysis.

Going back to our example to illustrate the different applications of these research methods, let’s imagine that you want to examine how use of risk assessment is furthered or hindered in in-patient settings. If you are interested in exploring administrators’ opinions on the factors that influence or discourage use of these assessments, approaching the study from a qualitative angle would be best. In this case, you would need to set up your research gap so that it leads to a statement about the lack of knowledge about administrators’ perceptions of the barriers and facilitators of risk assessment.

Now, let’s imagine instead that you want to establish statistically supported knowledge about a variety of concretely measurable factors that are associated with risk assessment use in in-patient settings. In this case, you would not want to use a problem statement that emphasizes lack of knowledge about administrator perceptions, but that instead emphasizes lack of knowledge about administrative or environmental factors that are correlated with risk assessment use.

In this situation, you could probably start with an interest in risk assessment related to violence perpetrated against in-patient clinicians and develop a qualitative or quantitative study. However, there are certain topics that have been extremely well studied that would not make an arguably important qualitative study. Similarly, if you are interested in examining a topic where no survey instruments have been developed and validated, you will have a very difficult time moving forward with a quantitative study.

Sometimes we find that master’s or doctoral candidates invest heavily in a particular research design, spending countless hours on writing and even polishing their work through APA editing, only to learn after a huge amount of work that it doesn’t align with the problem and research gap that they have spent so many hours developing.

If you’d like some help to develop your methodological approach for your dissertation so that it meshes with your overall research aims, give us a call or send an email. Consulting with one of our methodologists will surely help you to plan for your dissertation mindfully, and help you determine the best fit for your study given your interests, training, and capacities for participant sampling. Our assistance will definitely save you some time and effort on your dissertation by helping you to steer clear of common pitfalls associated with the rather complex process of topic development.

And when your reviewers have feedback for you, we’ll help you to revise! When we assist with projects, we actually include these at no additional charge, all the way to final approval.

If you’re planning a qualitative study and are having problems with developing any part of your topic, or if you’re working on a quantitative or mixed methods study, or even if you’re not sure, we can definitely help you out. We provide unlimited revisions to our work with no extra charge as needed to obtain approval of your work.

Thanks for watching!