A Sociological Study of the Problems of Graduate Students in Finding Dissertation Research Topics at the Tehran State Universities

As a sociological investigation, this study aims to examine the problems of sociology’s graduate students in finding dissertation research topics. This study was carried out as a descriptive and qualitative survey in which 30 students and professors at the Tehran, Alzahra and Allameh Tabatabaei universities were interviewed. Difficulties among students in finding research topic (problem) were explained by “socialization”, “paradigm” and “scientific community” concepts. Therefore, the weakness in creating scientific communities and paradigms in sociology were considered as research assumptions resulted in some difficulties through which students will be faced a problematic circumstances in their socialization processes. This at the end causes that students will confront with difficulties in finding research problem for their dissertations. The findings indicated that graduate students are confronting some relevant difficulties including the lack of interesting field, the lack of sociological questions, being doubtful about finding research problem, problems which are related to school and university educational system, the lack of scientific debates at the departments of sociology and little interactions amongst professors with each other and with their students are among problems.