Notes: Common Issues in the Thesis Topic Proposals

1. Your primary research question is the question that your research aims to answer directly.  Your motivation for the research may derive from interests that are more general, and you may want to discuss how your research results can inform bigger or more distant questions.  Still, your expected contribution, the substantive question that your research seeks to answer, is what defines your research question.
2. The center of any literature review for research is always the existing research and theory on the topic of your research, then the research and theory that is not on the same subject as your research but is still relevant to it. 
1. Your absolute obligation is to include in your review all reputable research that should inform your research.  If there is too much to include it all directly, you must include the most important and relevant and provide references to reviews or general works that can guide your reader to the work you cannot directly review. 
2. Your secondary obligation is to outline general areas of research and theory that are relevant to your research, clarifying their relevance to the topic and how your research follows are challenges their implications. 
3. The causal interpretations in your proposals should try to explain what goes on in the world that decides what the outcomes look like for the phenomena you are studying.  These should include the causal arguments proposed by others who have previously studied what you intend to study, even if you reject those arguments. 
1. Note, stating first that if A is larger, perhaps B is larger and then stating, alternatively, perhaps if A is larger, B is actually smaller is not offering alternative causal interpretations.  It is merely stating the same obvious fact about an empirical relationship in two ways.  (There may be rare exceptions to this when you have two defensible competing arguments that imply opposite relationships between a cause and an effect, but absent such arguments, declaring that being wrong about hypothesis X constitutes a second hypothesis Y just looks silly.)
4. The primary value of proposed research depends on what knowledge it can supply that does not already exist.  That should be the central point made about the value of your research.  That it seems to fulfill other social or moral goals is fine, but it can only do this to the degree that it is providing new knowledge (or usefully confirming existing knowledge that might otherwise be in doubt).