What do you think of my research idea? Is it viable? Any suggestions?

[psychstudent2990]

Hi all,

I've recently completed my undergraduate degree and honours year in psychology in Australia. I am now interested in pursuing a career in health psychology, and unfortunately I was rejected from the two health psych courses in Australia.

I'm now working towards studying in the UK. I have been offering a place in a MSc Health Psychology beginning in September, and now I just have a few financial things to figure out. From there, I'm hoping to go on to do a PhD in Health Psychology & Professional Practice, also in the UK. It's a degree that provides professional training as a health psychologist, and of course a research PhD.

I'll have to do a 10, 000 - 15, 000 word thesis for my MSc and I think a 60 000 - 70 000 word thesis for my PhD. I've had a few ideas, but I think I've settled on one. I'm really keen to conduct research that will benefit patients and is not only theoretically based. For me, psychology has always been about patient outcomes.

I like the idea of doing a health-related quality of life and well-being study in a health population (at this stage, I'm thinking neurological patients, as the brain has always fascinated me) for my MSc to inform my PhD.

Over the past few years, I have done my best to get as much exposure to different therapeutic models and techniques as possible. I have attended workshops in Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, Family-Focused Therapy, Writing Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. As a result, I've developed my own beliefs, and I'd really like to develop a psychosocial intervention of some kind for the aforementioned health population. My MSc study would help to form the rationale.

Of course, I haven't figured out the details yet, but I'm getting there. In the meantime, I'd really like the opinions of others.

What do you think of my idea? Is it viable? Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks!

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[AcronymAllergy]

People have done similar things, sure; it's a huge chunk of time/effort to develop your own intervention, though. But essentially piloting it for your masters and thereby spreading the work across the entirety of your doctoral training would help. I wonder if adapting existing treatment(s) might be more feasible, though?

Intervention studies (particularly for novel interventions) for dissertations can be tough, largely in terms of both recruitment and retention. But if you have a potentially large patient population from which to draw and the time to dedicate to finding subjects (e.g., don't start recruiting the fall before you're supposed to graduate), that might make things easier. And your work on your thesis should help you be able to determine just how realistic it'll be to pull the necessary numbers for a dissertation.

 

[smalltownpsych]

For me the hardest part of research is narrowing my scope to a specific enough research question. As I read your thoughts, what comes to my mind is: what is the problem that you are trying to get at? In other words, quality of life (QOL) and well-being in neurological patients is pretty broad and it would be difficult to devise an intervention to improve QOL, for example. Maybe the thesis would be to find out which factors most affect QOL. From there, maybe the dissertation could be an intervention designed to improve that factor.

 

[psychstudent2990]

Thanks for your responses AcronymAllergy and smalltownpsych. Recruiting is definitely something I'm concerned about, but won't be able to explore it fully until I arrive in the UK. I also like the idea of narrowing the focus of my study to which factors most affect QOL - thanks. I'm thinking it may also be beneficial to focus on a smaller participant group (e.g., brain tumour patients instead of the broader category of neurological patients). Thanks again!