Dissertation Ideas

There are mixed messages about dissertation ideas at the beginning stages of a PhD program. On one hand, everyone tells you not to get ahead of yourself and start worrying about what your dissertation topic will be. Students tell you to worry about classes, advisors tell you to trust the process and let the professors help you decide, and your own gut tells you it's too early to worry about it. Yet, the very same people will ask about your ideas for a dissertation and when you start rambling about ten different loosely related ideas they recommend that you start focusing on one area and not allow yourself to be all over the place. And I guess the advice isn't really contradictory--I can start narrowing the topic without making a decision and without putting so much energy into it that I don't focus on classes.


There really are only a few topic areas that I have enough interest in that I would want to spend a couple years of my life researching. Barring some unusual event or opportunity, I will definitely write about child welfare, but that could mean a million things. The disproportionate representation and disparate outcomes of ethnic and racial minorities in the child welfare system has been my major area of interest and experience the last couple years. I have the right contacts and an adequate grasp of the issues and, in some ways, it would be an easy area to write about since I've already done it. I'm also starting to be known in the field for it so it seems like a natural fit.

I admit I have been myopic: I have focused on domestic issues to the exclusion of international issues but I don't want that to limit me. My main experience in international child welfare has been it's interface with the domestic system in regard to kinship care, and related to trafficking. Perhaps there is a way to look at disproportionality and disparities across countries. What does it look like in South Africa? The UK? Germany? Does it matter? How does it look for children of Arab descent post-9/11 in the U.S. compared to France? I don't know. That's not quite right but maybe it's a start?

Other areas to consider: youth in transition, poverty and child welfare (maybe the transition out of poverty? the interaction between TANF and CPS workers?), child welfare workforce recruitment and retention, ack, I have a million ideas!