Dissertation Topic Suggestions/Advice?

Ok, third times a charm...Tried replying to my original thread 3 times over a number of days, but nothing shows up so....


I was thinking of maybe focusing on the aspect of insurance companies and their impact on the the rising cost of healthcare in the US. Maybe compare US healthcare to the state run systems of other nations. Explore how they pretty much are like an evil entity that basically does nothing but raise the cost of healthcare and limit one's choices.

Thanks Shawn and Kizmet for your feedback.

 

It's important to select a dissertation topic that is narrow enough that you can address it in a reasonable period of time. Your broad topic is interesting (and politically charged), but will need to be narrowed to a researchable topic. There's only one of you and you want to graduate before you shuffle off to a nursing home. To accomplish this, you might want to start with some specific research questions and then think about how you would answer your proposed questions.

For example, here are two (not very good) research questions related to your broad topic:
RQ1. Does the fee-for-service insurance system in the US increase healthcare costs as compared to state-run medical systems?
RQ2. Is the quality of medical care in the US better than medical care provided by state-run medical systems?

You'll have to define the terms you use in your research questions. For the second research question, you could define the term "better" as people's life expectancy after diagnosis of a few specific diseases. Alternatively, average life expectancy across entire populations creates too many confounding variables to be a useful measure. If you did, Cuba would have a fantastic healthcare system by this measure and a terrible system using other measures of healthcare quality.

The next step is to think about what research methodology you would use to answer each question. This might be the most important step in the process. For the first research question, you could simply compare publicly available data about healthcare costs in each of the countries in your study to determine total costs. For the second question, you could find some well-accepted and recognized measure(s) for quality of healthcare and use it/them to measure the quality of medical care in those same countries.

Finally, look at the potential/expected results of research -- given the specific questions and research methodology you've selected -- and think about whether anyone would care about your results. In this example, if you found that healthcare in the US is more expensive but it's also of higher quality, would anyone care about your results? Is this new information that can drive change or influence future decision makers. My guess is that people wouldn't be interested in these results; so I suggest coming up with better research questions than these two crappy questions that I came up with off the top of my head.

A good way to come up with better research questions is to read other people's dissertations to get a feel for good research questions and methodologies in your area of interest. Also, dissertations frequently include specific recommendations for future research.

Best of luck!

 

IMHO, You might want to take a more objective approach......

 

Here's why your posts do not show up right away: http://www.degreeinfo.com/general-distance-learning-discussions/35100-new-users-ask-where-did-my-posts-go.html You say that nothing shows up, but I'll bet your posts do eventually show up. Let me know if they don't and I'll look into it.