Discovering Research and My Topics

Discovering Research and My Topics
Leslie Cermak

Before I came to graduate school, I was completely ignorant about all one must accomplish in order to earn a masters degree. No one in my family had ever been to college before, let alone graduate school, so I walked into the conceptual issues course without any idea of what I wanted to study or even what research meant to this field. To me, “research” was what scientists did in a laboratory, not something I ever thought I would do after teaching English as a second language.
However, in the short time I’ve been here, I have come to realize exactly how important research is to every discipline, and as I read about various theories, I have learned that not all research requires chemistry goggles or laboratory coats.
Although I still have difficulty seeing myself as a researcher, I have enjoyed reading about all of the different theories including normative theories (including the theory of social responsibility) but as discussed in my previous post, I was unsure of a topic that I actually wanted to focus on. I have often grown frustrated during talks with Dr. Gade about my lack of ideas for a thesis, but he would then laugh and tell me that I had just come up with at least four different research questions...unfortunately, I could never figure out what they were.
I have, however, figured out along the way a few things that help to develop a research topic. First, one has to be interested in it. As we have heard in this seminar class and from other professors, it is important to really like what we will study because we will become absorbed in it. I never thought I had come up with a research idea because I had never been completely interested in any of the topics I had discussed. It wasn’t until I took Dr. Craig’s ethics class and read Ron Smith’s Groping for Ethics in Journalism that I began asking more questions than the assigned readings provided.
This leads me to the second element necessary to develop a research topic: questioning what is missing from previous readings. It’s not that the books or articles I had read weren’t thorough, they just didn’t address my specific thoughts. I also found during that class that I was often looking for supplemental material including that on the Poynter Institute’s Web site to see how journalism ethics was taught elsewhere in the classrooms. By observing my classmates, I began to wonder where their preconceptions about the media’s responsibilities came from. Although they all had similar thoughts about the media, they were not that far along into their degrees or the ethics class to seemingly develop such similar viewpoints.
Similarly, through ethics class, I also became interested in how similar or dissimilar today’s press system is to that in social responsibility theory. Although scholars have contended that the press is currently more concerned about presenting issues to the public so they can become more involved in democracy, much research still shows that coverage of political campaigns, for example, is still centered on the race itself and not the issues. Likewise, more space in the paper and newscasts seems reserved for the newest turn in Britney Spears’ life than Kosovo being recognized as a separate nation.
This led me to wonder how those in the field may conceptualize social responsibility differently from the scholars that study and define it. One resource that has been particularly helpful to me throughout this entire process beginning with research methods has been a site constructed by a professor at Michigan State University. It explains issues about forming a graduate committee as well as writing an actual research proposal.