Finding your Social Science Project

A practical guide to finding your research topic, applicable to all fields of social science.

A practical guide to finding your research topic, for social scientists of all fields who wish to improve their creativity and productivity. It should be of interest to readers who are just setting out and looking for thesis topics, as well as those who have been ploughing the fields for some time and wish to explore new areas.The most important step in social science research is the first step – finding a topic. Unfortunately, little guidance on this crucial and difficult challenge is available. Methodological studies and courses tend to focus on theory testing rather than theory generation. This book aims to redress that imbalance. The first part of the book offers an overview of the book's central concerns. How do social scientists arrive at ideas for their work? What are the different ways in which a study can contribute to knowledge in a field? The second part of the book offers suggestions about how to think creatively, including general strategies for finding a topic and heuristics for discovery. The third part of the book shows how data exploration may assist in generating theories and hypotheses. The fourth part of the book offers suggestions about how to fashion disparate ideas into a theory.