[Expert Insight]
In our foundational guide to choosing your dissertation topic, we explored the key elements of a strong, feasible, and motivational idea.
But what about the most technical part of that process: proving that your topic is novel and relevant?
This is where most students get stuck. In our work, we often see a student’s passion for a topic get derailed by the frustrating, and often misunderstood, search for a “research gap.”
This article, from one of our firm’s senior experts, is a practical, no-nonsense guide to that exact challenge. It moves beyond the “why” and gives you the “how”—what a research gap actually is, where to find one, and how to prove it exists.
Choosing your Dissertation Topic
Choosing a topic for your dissertation is deceptively difficult. At a glance, it seems like the easiest part of the process. However, picking a relevant and researchable topic is much more challenging than it may appear. Typically, doctoral students will choose a dissertation topic that is close to their heart and relevant to their experiences, even if those experiences are negative in nature (Orr et al., 2021). While this impulse is not a bad thing, having an idea of your topic from your experiences can be blinding in that the most important part of a dissertation topic is how researchable the topic is.
Writing a dissertation is usually a student’s first foray into real research. Indeed, the dissertation is arguably the process of “learning how to do scholarly research.” In this sense, everything that is needed for a real study is required and, indeed, for the purposes of demonstrating mastery, every requirement of a real study is amplified. One of the elements of this process is that research needs to be conducted on a topic that there is a need for more research on. A common mistake is to assume that there being no evident research on a topic is evidence for a need for research on it (Kostere & Kostere, 2021). This is, however, very much not the case. Some topics simply are not considered worthwhile to research because there is no real reason to investigate them.
An experienced researcher may deem such topics relevant or not by their own judgment. A novice researcher, however, is expected to be able to show why the topic needs further study.
The Research Gap: Your Foundation
In the dissertation process, the crux of proving a topic is relevant for further study is the research gap. A research gap is defined, in scholarly terms, not as a lack of research on the topic altogether, but rather a topic that has only been researched a little or which is adjacent to a known topic. To demonstrate that a research gap exists, a doctoral student is usually expected to provide around three gap sources.
Gap sources are the crux of the dissertation topic. Most published research includes a section on “limitations” and/or a section on “future directions” near the end of the paper. These sections point to topics or aspects of a topic that the paper’s authors feel could use further study. It is these statements of “further research is required regarding XYZ” or “Lack of XYZ was a limitation of our study, so future studies may consider XYZ” that serve as the foundation of the research gap. With three such calls for research, a research gap can be established.
How to Find and “Triangulate” a Gap
There are several important nuances to research gaps. The first is recency. A research gap source typically needs to be from the past five years, if not the past 2-3 years. If a researcher said “There is a need for more research on Y” seven years ago, there is a very good chance that (a) Y was researched by someone else since then or (b) Y is no longer as relevant as it was seven years ago. Therefore, establishing a research gap requires recency of the established sources.
On the other hand, the research gap can be somewhat triangulated.
That is to say, if you wish to study “transformational leadership in the military,” you need not find three sources calling for this specific combination. One gap source calling for “more research on military leadership” and two calling for “more research on transformational leadership in different contexts” would serve to triangulate this research gap.
As such, there are two main ways of locating a research gap as the foundation for your research:
- The Straightforward Way: Take an interest in a broader topic—say, transformational leadership—and search the recent literature on that topic to identify the areas that need further study.
- The Triangulation Way: If you have strong feelings about a more specific, intersecting topic, you will likely want to look at studies about both of the intersecting ideas and use the triangulation approach to identify places where one field can point toward applications in the other.
Final Considerations
Another important consideration when choosing a topic is whether you want to do a qualitative [] or quantitative [] study. You can find out more about these two research types at the links above. The nature of the research you may want to conduct does a lot to determine the methodology, because certain topics are more variable driven and fall into qualitative methods, while other topics are more open-ended and exploratory, therefore requiring more of a qualitative approach. Other topics can be studied through either, but it is worth understanding in advance whether a topic is more likely to align with one approach or the other before selecting it.
A final key point may seem obvious but is often missed: you need to be sure your study topic aligns with your program of study. If you are seeking a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology, for example, then your study must not only be psychological, but also align with organizational applications. Failing to ensure this congruence makes your topic very unlikely to be approved. However, topics can often be pivoted to more closely align with a program of study.
These are some of the most important considerations when choosing a topic. You may have others as well. Some schools may have their own requirements, or your chair may have preferences. For this reason, it’s generally a good idea not to get too attached to a topic idea until you’re sure it will actually work.
References
Kostere, S., & Kostere, K. (2021). The generic qualitative approach to a dissertation in the social sciences: A step by step guide. Routledge.
Orr, E., Durepos, P., Jones, V., & Jack, S. M. (2021). Risk of secondary distress for graduate students conducting qualitative research on sensitive subjects: A scoping review of Canadian dissertations and theses. Global Qualitative Nursing Research, 8, 2333393621993803. https://doi.org/10.1177/2333393621993803
Your Partner on this Journey
We know that navigating the literature to find a viable research gap is a process filled with nuance. You don’t have to do it alone. If you would like to discuss your topic development with an expert partner, please visit our foundational development page to learn more about how we can assist you.
