Finding Social Science Research Topics for PhD 🎓

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One of the difficulties that many graduate students face is coming up with research topics for their thesis or dissertation. It turns out that it is not nearly as difficult as you think it's going to be.

Where do you actually find research topics?

The best research topics are the ones that you actually care about personally. Why? you will be doing research on this topic for a long time. I would look for things in your immediate environment to describe and talk about.

For example, you might look to see why you actually participate in a certain group. The reasons might be social contact, a sense of reciprocity, social norms. Obviously, this is not an interesting question, and we already know a lot of these questions.

However, you are treating the world as a static place when you just come up with labels. You should think about questions that are curious.

What would it take to dissolve the group, or to gradually erode your sense of participating in that group?
What would happen if there was somebody with the opposite behavior that enters the group? Would the group be accepting? If so, why?
Try to think about the particular situation as multiple independent subjects that are very different from each other. Do these differences matter to the group or organization?
Think about the time scales in formation over time? what is the history of the group in did that matter to its formation?
Think about external environmental conditions and things that are outside of the group's control. How much does things, like gender and geographic location matter?

Basically, what you want to do is start picking ads in coming up with what if questions about the particular phenomenon that you are curious and passionate about. you will soon discover that there is very little research on any of these topics, and that you can bring together many different streams of research to explain them.

Then, once you have a basic idea of what you want to do then you simply just want to go and share your idea with others and see what they think.

Check out:

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https://youtu.be/czxVgSvGhxE

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David Maslach is a research professor of entrepreneurship, innovation, and business strategy, I discuss topics, such as behavioral science, strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and apply these to my new peer proofreading and editing platform. Topics include the sharing economy, altruism, investing in technology, starting a business, and bounded rationality. My favorite videos pertain to incentives, goal setting, and learning from failure to drive behaviors such as weight loss, stopping telemarketers, creating novel technologies, and creating new movements.

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