Looking for feedback on my Honours topic

[Hats1278]

Hi Folks,

I am enrolled in the Honours program at my school this semester, and I have been working on narrowing down the topic for my thesis. I was hoping for some feedback from others about my tentative focus.

My initial idea was rooted in homelessness and social isolation/disaffiliation. My initial research took me in the direction of stigma as a (partial) explanation for social disaffiliation in this community. After my meeting with my supervisor, he encouraged me to simplify things a little bit.

At this point, I am very interested in stigma. I was reading a paper about Woodsquat, and the author noted "sympathetic" portrayals of the movement were still emphasizing dominant, hegemonic viewpoints on the social issues of poverty and homelessness. From that point, I was considering looking at local, "sympathetic" media portrayals of the issue of homelessness (particularly during/after the pandemic there has been a ton of coverage of transitional housing, i.e., motels), and looking at how that contributes to stigma and reinforces dominant views.

As a theoretical framework I was considering using Goffman and Foucault.

Overall I am just very unsure of myself, and any feedback from others would be welcome.

I wonder: is this type of project is covering ground that has been tread too often? Is there something you would change?

Thank you very much.

[lkaitlyn]

Listen to your supervisor! (Sidenote, but that's the key to grad school, it turns out.)

Personally, I like doing more empirical projects and yours sounds very theory-heavy at first. Is that what you're supposed to do, or is the thesis supposed to be empirical? Either way, I encourage you to simplify language when trying to describe your research so you fully understand what it is that you're doing.

You mention maybe doing a content analysis of media portrayals of homelessness, which sounds super interesting to me and is empirical research. I'd sort out whether you're looking at how the pandemic has affected homelessness portrayals in the media (sidenote: pick a country, because it will be too complicated cross-nationally; also figure out how you're going to define "media" and which sources you'll use) or how the media portrays homelessness generally ... but not both. Also figure out what you'd look at within media (photographs? writing? article titles? videos?).

One problem is I'm not sure how you'll show a causal connection between the media and changes in public stigma around homelessness. I think maybe rather than focus on how the media has changed stigma, focus on how the media does or does not stigmatize homelessness (and talk about hypotheses you have about how that might translate to real life), but be careful not to make a causal argument you can't support with your data. Your advisor should be able to help you sort out what you can and can't prove.

Edited September 23, 2022 by lkaitlyn

[Hats1278]

Thanks for the detailed response!

I was looking at some more stuff since I posted: I found a couple of papers which look at media portrayals of tent city-type settlements in Vancouver, using Goffman's framing theory. I thought that I could try to replicate those studies by analyzing media coverage of tent cities in my own city (a bunch of popped up in the last 5 years, particularly during the pandemic). And I thought I could expand the theoretical framework a little bit, perhaps to include Goffman's theory of stigma (maybe I'll ask my supervisor about that too).

At this point I thought that I would use news articles, thought I found a lot of personal video type stuff on twitter and other social media.

Thanks for pointing that out about causal arguments - I'm meeting with my supervisor next week and I will make sure to clarify that with him.

[lkaitlyn]

I definitely think expanding upon Goffman would be interesting! If there are videos/Tweets/social media about tent cities in your area, that could be a really cool way of modernizing the Goffman study. Either way, this sounds very interesting!