When you want to study something, you need to define what it is and what it isn't.
Your concept needs boundaries, both internal and external. You need to get precise about your wording, otherwise you won't be able to provide a precise theory.
By analogy, consider the word "thing".
There is no consistent group of objects that make up "thing".
As a result of imprecision, we cannot study what people mean by "thing".
"Thing" is what you call something when you don't bother coming up with the precise word for the object.
e.g. "Pass me that thing." vs "Please pass me those scissors."
In science, you need to figure out more precise words to describe the phenomenon you are interested in studying.
Sometimes, you may find that you are interested in a construct that is too broad, like "thing". In such cases, you would be wise to break the general category into sub-categories so that you can focus on the specifics that you're interested in and articulate nuance in your research.
If I'm interested in "memory", I need to know whether I mean long-term or short-term or working-memory or semantic-memory or episodic-memory or memory-formation or recall, on and on.
Even if I, as a person, find all those areas of memory interesting, I won't be able to study all of those sub-areas at once. I'll need to run multiple studies. In each study, I need to get more precise and specify the narrower construct that this study probes.
Being able to define constructs is also important for graduate school applications.
By the time you are applying to grad school, you should have a clear idea of the sub-area that interests you. Saying you are interested in "the mind" or "psychopathology" or "cognition" is far too generic. Even saying you are interested in "human attention" or "how memory works" or "depression" would be pretty generic for a graduate application. Over time, you should be able to define your interests with more and more precision, even if you are still interested in broader psychology in a more generic way.
Saying that I am interested in meta-awareness and the moment of insight is quite specific. Sure, I'm interested in attention more broadly and in how we focus and lose focus, but the broad is somewhat implied by the narrow whereas the narrow isn't implied by the broad.
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