Honors Thesis - I feel like everything has been studied already!

[SpoiledKiwi]

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Ok, I know that there are still a lot of things that haven't been studied yet, but how do I go about finding one? I currently assist with research in non-suicidal self injury, so I can do something related to that or borderline personality disorder. I only have two semesters for data collection and I'm pretty much limited to a population of college students. I've been reading articles and thinking of things, but everything that I consider has already been done or won't work with my time/population limits.

How do you guys go about finding things to research? I can talk to my advisor but I'm afraid it will make me look like an idiot if I can't come up with anything.

 

[cmuhooligan]

Don't feel ashamed talking to your advisor, that's why they're there! As for how I personally find research ideas, sometimes I simply observe a behavior in my personal or clinical life, then I go to the literature and see if i can draw upon that. Other than that, the tried and true method of reading, reading, reading...this usually spurs ideas!

G'luck!

 

[PsyDr]

For quick and easy, choose somethign obscure.


in undergrad i figured out that basically nothing has been written on frotteurism, making it the easiest thing to review the literature for.


here:

"the prevalence of frotteurism in a college sample."

by including individuals rubbing up ons peopel while dancing at frat parties, you could have significant findings. it would take like 3 weeks to do the entire study.

frotteurism in frat guys vs. non fratties. ina college sample. the media would eat this stuff up.

also: i would expect some authorship credit if you get it published.

 

[JockNerd]

Ok, I know that there are still a lot of things that haven't been studied yet, but how do I go about finding one? I currently assist with research in non-suicidal self injury, so I can do something related to that or borderline personality disorder. I only have two semesters for data collection and I'm pretty much limited to a population of college students. I've been reading articles and thinking of things, but everything that I consider has already been done or won't work with my time/population limits.

How do you guys go about finding things to research? I can talk to my advisor but I'm afraid it will make me look like an idiot if I can't come up with anything.

How familiar are you with your research area? Before I did my honours thesis I did a directed readings source on sexual orientation. This entailed reading a massive body of literature and writing a few papers on neat topics. I was able to identify enough topics to plan out a research program for prettymuch all of grad school and what will form the beginning of my career as a prof. Really get into the readings and look at them super-critically; what are underlying assumptions that people are making that aren't fully justified by the research that's there? How can you draw two currently separate lines of inquiry together neatly? If you're really interested in self-injury as a topic in graduate studies I'd say stick with that.

 

[Thrak]

Ok, I know that there are still a lot of things that haven't been studied yet, but how do I go about finding one? I currently assist with research in non-suicidal self injury, so I can do something related to that or borderline personality disorder. I only have two semesters for data collection and I'm pretty much limited to a population of college students. I've been reading articles and thinking of things, but everything that I consider has already been done or won't work with my time/population limits.

How do you guys go about finding things to research? I can talk to my advisor but I'm afraid it will make me look like an idiot if I can't come up with anything.

Self-injury and stress? Like end-of-semester (finals, etc.) vs. middle of semester.

Self-injury and type-a vs type-b personalities?

Not my area of expertise, but just off the top of my head.

I usually think of a topic area/population, think of a survey/scale/measure/inventory/what have you, and think about whether there should be an potential for differentiation. If it seems like an interesting thing, I investigate it further... if not, I drop it. For example, self-injury and religiosity doesn't seem to interesting to me, so that's something I wouldn't pursue.

That's just me though.