Research Topic - A Fleeting Thought

An interesting thing happened this weekend... well, maybe not interesting; rather, it was unusual for me. I am in the Culminating Experience course (OLAM 486), which is essentially a research paper. On the surface, it is not so difficult, until you here the words... "What you do for your project is up to you." Sounds great? Not really.

It is much easier to be told what to do. Seriously! "Your assignment is a 50 page paper on ___________." Okay, I can do that. Thinking of a topic that is interesting enough, large enough (but not too large), yet one that is manageable is rather difficult. Why? Because there really is so much out there that is interesting!

Our task for the first week was to select a topic. Okay, after 2 or 3 submissions, I settled on servant leadership. In the second week, we start to get serious... the proposal, which is the 10-15 page document that describes what you are going to do and how you are going to do it as well as an annotated bibliography of the sources you wil use. In this phase, a research is supposed to let the research guide them; that is, see what is out there, what is really interesting, what has been beaten to death, or what needs more research. From that research, one narrows down the topic. For me, this was quite difficult.

So, we derive a research question: "Can servant leadership survive in a transactional world?" (This question actually came about in a collaboration from a previous class) It may seem simple enough, but in actuality, it was huge! Too huge! in a matter of days, I had more than 20 books and 100 articles, and I barely got into it. Okay, so obviously the scope of that project was not condusive to an 8-week class.

How about, "College students' understanding, perceptions, and use of servant leadership: An early indicator of whether servant leadership will survive the twenty-first century" Again... more focused, but still really, really huge. Okay, how can I do this.. think! Think! Ahaaaa...

Just chop the second half and be left with: "College students' understanding, perceptions, and use of servant leadership" - Now we are getting closer. Not sure if we are there yet, but better. Perhaps I should just take one of the three elements... understanding, perception or use? Not sure at the moment, but hopefully this will get all cleared up in the next 12 hours.