My current list of possible topics would leave me with a very long list of possible things to research, so I’m going to focus on just one or two. I’m choosing Group Decision Making and International Perception of US Politics over time.
For Group Decision Making, I will definitely have to study on the psychology related to the topic of decision making and more specifically group decision making. For this, I could look at any of the many prestigious psychology journals available and check their table of contents ant indexes for articles related to my topic. If I wanted to look more specifically at the difference between group decisions and individual decisions, I would have to search more directly for studies related to this topic, so I would use the UR library database. I might try with keywords such as “decision”, decision making”, “group”, “individual”, “outcome”, and so on.
For International Perception of US Politics over time, I would so more primary research work on international newspapers writing about US politics. For this I would probably go directly to the websites of these papers and search for articles about US politics. If the significance of this research questions was related to how perception affects foreign policy, I could search for scholarly articles on this topic in the UR Library database, using keywords such as “United States”, “Foreign perception”, “foreign relations”, “implications”, and so on.
So group decision making you will need to narrow down–about what? in what contexts? Maybe look up research on ThinkTanks and that sort of thing (for what it’s worth, Dr. Forsyth will not be available next year to advise theses, if that matters to your interests).
For Perception of the US, think about whether you are interested in a specific region (Middle East, Europe, etc.) or a specific medium (tv, film, internet, food, etc.). You can cross multiple of ONE of those categories, but not multiple of BOTH categories. What you want to examine will point you toward different advisors, as well.