Another thesis topic experience
My blogger friend, Ian, at Harvard Extended, had a very different research experience from mine when he delved into his topic — so I wanted to share his POV:
I had a different sort of challenge for my thesis — identifying existing research for an obscure topic, and whittling down the focus to something manageable and testable. Primary sources weren’t a problem (I used thousands of articles from the Xinhua News Agency) but there wasn’t much recent literature on the foreign policy issues involved — in fact, the two sources that I tested my data against were a journal article from the late 1980s and a book from the early 1990s. And while the computer content analysis literature is quite extensive, I was unable to find any specific studies that were based on Xinhua’s English-language service.
Ian picked a quantitative approach, which is unusual in Social Science ALMs, so I think that may have compounded his trouble. But I think the ‘take-away’ message from both of us: the research process is not easy or predictable. Steel yourself!
