Working on a Research Topic

I am still working on figuring out exactly the problem that I want to study for my thesis or project. I have thought about working on a professional project since I would have a tangible product to include on my resume.
One project that I have been thinking about would be developing a plan to improve the website for my wife's sister's business. She and her husband run a few skateboard shops in San Diego. They have a pretty well run brick and mortar business but their website could use some work and designing the site based on marketing, advertising, and CMC theory would be a resume building project.
As a Chickasaw, I am interested in investigating public relations or advertising issues in Native American tribes or nations. The Chickasaw Nation has multiple business enterprises. While the casino and gaming businesses are perhaps the best known, there are other ventures the tribe is involved in. CNI is a Chickasaw corporation that bids for government contract work, and Bank2, is a consumer and business bank wholly owned by the Chickasaw Nation. The Chickasaw Nation also owns and operates a radio station and even a fine chocolate retail operation. The "stockholders" in these operations are the Chickasaw people who then see the "profits" from these businesses in the form of expanded health care, housing assistance, care for elders, educational initiatives, historical and cultural preservation efforts and jobs for both native and non-native people. I first became interested in these issues in college when I spent a summer in Washington D.C.; first as an intern for former Sen. Don Nickles as a Morris K. Udall scholar then as a staff intern in the office of the Ambassador to the Chickasaw Nation.
However, I have am also interested in academic areas of study in advertising and the internet. From reviewing some of the available literature it seems like the field is wide open. User-created advertising, like the ipod Touch ad for Apple that was originally created by an 18 year old kid in Great Britain, would be a nearly unimaginable phenomenon in the pre-internet era. Advergaming, interactive activities online, social network promotions are just a few of the broad areas of interest that someone studying advertising could research.
I took Dr. Yoon's Non-Traditional Media class last semester. One of the best things about that class was the number of guest speakers from the advertising field. Almost all of the advertising professionals said that most of the people in the field knew that the internet was a different place and a different way to do business but that there wasn't yet a consensus on how the internet was different. In a lot of cases, the speakers weren't 100% exactly how people were going to get paid for providing content but everyone knew that not setting up content on the web wasn't an option.
I am going to start working for the RISE project next week as a research assistant. I wanted to work on this project in the hopes of becoming a more confident researcher. I think some of my worry about a final project or thesis is making sure I know what I'm doing. This project is studying minority students in engineering, math and science. The research group conducted a ton of interviews a couple of years ago and is now in the process of evaluating the mountains of data they collected from the interviews. The project is now using some qualitative software to sort and categorize the data and some mixed methods work to make some larger connections about how these students adapt, survive and thrive on campus as students.