Now this might sound pretty obvious but I can't tell you the number of times I've seen students run down a path, spend so many hours days weeks months entertaining some research idea only to find out that for some reason that's not allowed by the university. So it's really really important to start with the core requirements, understand what the essentials are from your university and understand what the deal-breakers might be in terms of topics that are not allowed. At a minimum you want to make sure that you understand the following. Firstly the originality requirements, in other words how unique does your research topic need to be? Now this will vary a lot depending on your degree and and what sort of course you're enrolled in but you need to get clarity on what topic originality and uniqueness requirements they have for your specific research project. The second thing you need to look at is research topic restrictions. In other words what areas are you allowed to research. Do they need to link to certain modules or do you pretty much have freedom in in terms of what you can choose as long as it's within the domain of your degree. Another thing you need to understand is the data requirements - specifically does your university require that you have primary research that you have secondary research or do they require both. Another really important thing that you need to understand is what are the research methodology requirements. In other words do they have specific requirements about whether you need to do a quantitative study whether you need to do a qualitative study perhaps they have a requirement or they encourage you to do mixed methods. So it's really important to understand what are the expectations.
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The last really important thing that you need to understand is ethical requirements. All universities will have some sort of ethical framework and and some sort of ethical standards and and guidelines which everyone needs to adhere to and so you need to understand what those are and what that means in terms of limitations on your field work. It might mean that you can only interview certain people or that you can only ask certain types of questions and/or that you need clearance for for certain types of work or areas of research. So it's really important to understand what are those ethical requirements and what do they mean in terms of restricting your research topic. As you can see it's really important to understand what does the university need from you what what are the restrictions that they put in place. Otherwise you can spend a huge amount of time ultimately to land up in a dead end.
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The lesson here is know the rules of the game before you play and with that we can move on to step three. So now that you understand the rules of the game, you have license to start looking at potential research areas. The approach that we take to research topics is to start really broad and then narrow that down narrow that down until you get to a set of research potential research topics that we can then evaluate. We'll get to that later but the starting point for now is to identify broad research areas that interest you. So what you're looking for here is areas of your studies, the modules that you've done, that interest you. For example in an MBA context it might be something like social media marketing, it might be something like leadership, it might be something like innovation or innovative cultures. Whatever broad research areas have interested you as you've worked through through your degree. Make a list of those broad interest areas and they don't need to be at all pointed or specific.
