Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

Dissertation ideas...

So due to starting my third year in September I've started thinking about a topic for my psych dissertation.
Obviously as with many students in the current financial economy the value of a degree in general can often be questionable. The concept of 'Mickey Mouse Degrees' (waste of time degrees) is clearly an interesting one so how would people think about investigating this topic from a psych point of view??
Any help would be a massive help as my questionnaire could do with a bit of padding out at present.

Reply 1

iammichealjackson

Original post by tom2899

This could be a really interesting topic, albeit not very psychologically related. Don't know much about questionnaires, there's a new book out "Improving survey methods" that would probably be a good read. Might also be worth looking into qualitative research (e.g. focus groups, interviews, even looking at TSR posts). If you used a variety of methods then i'd imagine you'd be in a especially good place for applying for certain jobs that value those skills (e.g. market research).

Reply 2

Emma123_

From a psych point of view, you could take your topic down the route of 'Are Mickey Mouse degrees worth their rising costs?: From the students perspective' etc. you could have your participants complete questionnaires about: how they viewed uni before starting compared to being in uni or even compared to graduating, questionnaires on if they want to pursue a career in their degree field, their plans when leaving uni, how much they expect their salary to be within their field. You could even go down the route of using a self-esteem questionnaire scores of graduates from a variety of degrees compared to the scores of individuals who chose to not go to uni, to see if uni students are losing more than just their money.
The good thing about psychology is your ideas can be manipulated into going pretty much any way you like as long as its testable.
(P.S. I'm a recent psychology graduate)

Reply 3

doodle_333

you can basically do anything, you'll get points for originality with what you're looking at even if it doesn't go so well, the most important thing is to do a really good write up and use a good method

personally I think your idea lends itself to a qualitative study, focus groups in particular, use people from a STEM course with high employment rates vs social scientists and ask them to talk about degrees and the worth of uni then discuss the common rhetorics and how these differed - easier than a quantitative study on this topic as you don't have to think of something to associate it with to do more complex stats and you don't need to worry about finding nothing

I would guess the only issue you may have is with literature, I'd guess it's not something widely studied, but you might just have to be creative, you can use a few references to explain your method of analysis if you do qual, you might find similar studies for job types or something?