A Study of Subject Areas and Research Methods of Public Administration Master’s Theses: The Case of University of Tehran

This article reports the findings of the content analysis of 184 public administration theses defended at university of Tehran within a 10-year period (1998-2007). The content of the master’s theses were analyzed regarding their subject areas and research methods. Results revealed that some trends in subjectsareas and research methods in public administration theses could be identified. The master's theses focused mainly on threefields: human resources (79 of 252), organizational behavior (78 of 252), and organization theory & design (72 of 252). Therefore, it could be concluded thatsubject areas did not include topics which are considered to be more related to public administration issues (e.g. policy making). Regardingdata analysis techniques, most of the theses used correlation coefficient (132 of 323), analyze of variance (72 of 323), or mean difference tests (69 of 323). Questionnaire was the most frequently employed tool for collecting data (174 of 257), compared to interviews (43 of 257), archival analysis (36 of 257), and observations(4 of 257).