Well, I can’t put it off any longer. It’s time to start my dissertation. But, the prospect of committing to a topic is daunting. So I’m wondering - how did you arrive at a topic? And do you have any advice for someone about to start on the process?
FWIW, I’m working on my Ph.D. in sociology.
I made sure it was a topic I was very interested in, because of the amount of time I’d be spending on it. I also discussed my options with my tutor, and wrote a proposal for my chosen topic to make sure it could work.
I came up with several possible topics for my MA thesis and talked to my advisor about them before choosing one. It was hard because basically she told me I had to contribute something new but base it in already existing theories (I was a literature major). Before I turned in my final draft I think I switched topics about four times - I even switched primary texts somewhere along the way. My proposal looked nothing like my finished product. At first I was stressed about switching around but most of my colleagues were the same way - during the process of their research they found stuff that would completely change their minds about their topic. So I guess my two cents would be to not feel too constrained by the topic you initially choose. 
My thesis topic was about how Korean nationalism influenced their readings of Korean American texts. I originally started off with ideas of authenticity in Korean American literature. And I got started on THAT idea because out of my topic ideas, my advisor thought it was the one where I would have the most stuff to say. (I was resentful at first because I felt like I was being pigeonholed into this topic because of my ethnicity… but that’s another story.)
I just wrote a followup to the most recent paper of my thesis advisor. The whole thing was based on a misunderstanding on my part that, mirabile dictu, turned out to be correct. It was however a poor job (very ugly and computational). I eventually did it correctly about five year later. I gnawed away at the problem when I had nothing better to do during those five years and eventually cracked it wide open. This was mathematics, by the way.
Once I got th advice to immerse yourself in a topic so thoroughly that you have become the world’s expert on this particular, albeit tiny, subject. That was not what I did, but it is not bad advice.
I got interested in the general area of my dissertation my senior year of college, and decided on my topic (a new language) about two years in. I actually switched schools when my adviser died and no one else in the department was very interested. But I’ve never had a problem with coming up with new ideas. I know lots of professors who basically assign topics that support their research, I don’t think I could have handled that.
I chose by continuing the research I was conducting for my master’s thesis. My area was Environmental Psychology, and my dissertation was on elderly housing trends in urban environments [broadly].
You are studying Sociology? What is your area of interest?
My specialty areas within my department are Gender, Work, and Family (roughly: work-family balance issues, parenting practices and child outcomes, gender patterns in the home and in the workplace, etc.) and Social Theory. Part of my problem is that a lot of the GWF research in my dept tends to be fairly atheoretical and I’m struggling with how to bring my areas of interest together. I guess this whole dissertation thing isn’t supposed to be easy, right?
It’s a culmination of your education into a bound form that represents your grasp of an area of experitise using all you have learned…Yep, that’s what I told my first grad student advisee.
There has been a lot on Gender issues studied , single mothers, Transgender children etc…etc…
I chose to pursue something that had always bugged me about a particular approach scholars and practioners took.
In my field, some people noodle around with comparing and contrasting academic disciplines. How are they alike, how are they different, which ones would you group together and why, etc. One of the persistent divisions is between “professional” or “vocational” fields and those which are more traditional disciplines, like liberals arts and sciences. I always felt that there were some similarities and overlap between them that gets ignored in the work of classifying them. So that’s where I went poking around.
It was compelling to me because it was something that irked me. I mean, there was really solid, good work being done here by very smart people whose work I respected, but something niggled at me and I felt I could do some work, in a very tiny area, that would address a missing piece.
FWIW, by the time I was done with it I didn’t care so much about the topic. Heh. In the course of the doing the work, I found out some other interesting stuff, stuff that would have been worth pursuing if I hadn’t been so tired and ready to flee scholarly research for awhile.
I ended up working on the same topic that I worked on for my first seminar paper in my PhD program and became obsessed with, which was far too big an issue for a seminar paper but just about right for a diss. “I couldn’t work on that same topic for, say, a dissertation, could I. . .?” Advisor: “Hell yes you can.”
I had no idea what my M.A. thesis topic was going to be until exactly 1 month ago. Talk about waiting until the last minute: I’m about to submit my proposal, and will be writing the thesis next semester! Anyway, the class that I’m taking this semester inspired the topic. I had just a vague notion of an idea of a topic last semster, when I recruited my thesis director, so it was quite a relief to come up with a “real” topic last month – especially knowing that I had to write a proposal ASAP. I don’t think either of the other two classes I considered taking this semester would have resulted in such a solid idea, so I’m glad that I registered the way that I did.
Sorry I can’t be of much help. I’ve been dreading my thesis since I started grad school, and most of the dread has been about coming up with a topic.
Both the topic for my MA thesis and my dissertation topic just sort of… developed. Well, okay, the first one was a particular instance of a larger issue I was interested in, in the time period I was working on at the time. I had to sit down and think about choosing it for a while, though. My dissertation topic was easier - I realised that two of the papers I’d written in the last year were implicitly about a larger issue, and that was what I really wanted to get at - it was almost like a lightbulb turned on in my head as I figured that out.
I haven’t started writing the diss yet, though, so maybe you shouldn’t listen to me. Maybe it was a terrible plan and a bad topic! I hope not.
Oh, and the MA topic WAS a bad idea. I got it done, and done fairly well, but it was a much more challenging issue than I expected and I spent a lot of time feeling like I was banging my head against a brick wall.
End of 1st semester of grad school. I’ve just joined a lab.
Boss: Here’s what we have funding for. Does anything interest you? If you don’t care, you’ll work on A.
Ruken: I like B
Boss: Why?
Ruken: Because you can do cool stuff with it.
Boss: Ok. Talk to postdoc#14. He’s working on this stuff too and can help you get started.
Ruken: Cool.
(fast forward 3 years)
I’m working in the same general project area but definitely not in the direction I originally envisioned. Once it’s time to leave, I’ll wrap everything together into a disjointed volume, call it a dissertation, and leave.
It chose me.
The advice above to go with what you love is the best. You’re going to be married to it for a while, so you might as well enjoy it. Plus, if you’re going into academia, your dissertation defines your professional identity as you’re getting in the door, so again it’d better be something that you can stick with, and still be interested in, for a few years.