Ideas for dissertation

[elifreddie]

Hi all. I am not sure if I am allowed to post this on the forum but I am curious to see if anyone can help me find a subject to focus my dissertation on. I am currently studying a BSc Honors degree in Equine sports therapy and Rehabilitation. I have gone through many ideas for my dissertation but can not decide on one. I would like to focus on the horse owners perception of certain injuries or therapy techniques to rehabilitate from injuries. I need to find a well researched area to allow for a well rounded study. Please if anyone has any recommendations I would appreciate hearing them.

 

[DirectorFury]

Your dissertation supervisor should be guiding you on how to choose an original topic, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be telling my students to ask on a horse forum where the majority of the posters might not be up to date on research! Were you able to pick your supervisor so their research interests align with yours, or are you just allocated someone and told to get on with it?

It sounds like this is going to be a more qualitative study (perception of injuries and/or their rehab) which can actually be harder to write than a quant piece but that's OK.
I'd recommend picking a specific injury (suspensory, check lig, pedal bone fracture, etc) or a group of injuries (bone, soft tissue, chronic leg injuries, chronic hoof problems etc) and then using Google Scholar - scholar.google.com - to see what existing work there is. After you've got a broad idea for a topic you'll need to make sure it's novel so that you can clearly define your niche within the research area as this will make thesis writing a million times easier.

You'll also need to ask yourself 'why?' a lot. Let's say you decide to study the owner's perception of pedal bone fractures*, and their perceptions of the treatment types available and long term outcomes. Why is this something that you should spend a year studying? What will this add that is a net positive to the current knowledge about these? Could you frame it as a way to aid owner engagement with vets and complimentary health professionals? Or a way to mediate owner expectations at injury diagnosis? Etc etc.

* also is the perception of the injury itself? Or how it's acquired? Or the diagnostic process? Or or or... The narrower you can make your topic the easier it will be to write up .

I'd strongly recommend having a good chat with your dissertation supervisor though. I imagine that s/he is absolutely sick to the back teeth of badly designed, executed, and interpreted surveys and finding a topic that s/he has a specific interest in will pay off in the long run. If you're thinking of doing surveys or interviews then that's absolutely great, just make sure they're well designed! There are lots of books, and online articles, about designing good person-centered research and these will be a great asset.

 

[Equi]

To add to the survey point, we get a lot of them on here and most are very bad for dissertation level but it is also i think a good dry run for adding "i did this but it was not well received so i took the feedback and revised it and here is the result" type thing.